


The Importance of Being

by sevenimpossiblethings



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Theatre, M/M, Oscar Wilde - Freeform, Shakespearean Sonnets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-12 12:17:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 24,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4478939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenimpossiblethings/pseuds/sevenimpossiblethings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur is a stage manager. Eames is a star. </p><p>(Also: Robert names The Scottish Play, Ariadne likes to shout, and Mal just wants the dining hall to start serving wine.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A thousand, thousand, thousand thank-yous to Castillon02 for being an absolutely brilliant beta/word realtor, without whom my characters would wander into situations sans motivations and you would all be very confused by weird, incoherent musical theatre metaphors. Thank you for your patience and dedication; thank you for agreeing to go on another reference-filled adventure with me; thank you for having the same favorite line as I do; thank you for turning h/c into a verb.
> 
> I feel obligated to dedicate this to all techies, but especially to Aranel and M.D., without whose friendship (backstage and otherwise) I could not have endured the soul-crushing nature of being on crew for as long as I did.

It was the first week back after winter break, and Arthur was still trying to learn the rhythm of the new semester. It helped, a bit, that it was his sixth and therefore he knew he would find a rhythm, eventually, but he also wished he could forgo the first, unbalanced fortnight always required to achieve that ultimate equilibrium. 

As Arthur headed toward his dorm, he spotted Dom, who was making a beeline for him across the quad. Arthur resigned himself to the prospect of a semester of vertigo, rather than a mere two weeks. 

“Mal’s proposal finally cleared,” Dom shouted, as soon as Arthur was within range. 

“Oh?” 

Mal, Arthur’s first best friend at college and Dom’s girlfriend, was a senior theatre major and had had some… difficulties in procuring her advisor’s approval of her capstone directing project. 

“ _The Importance of Being Earnest_ ,” Dom said. 

“Queer? Gender-swapped? Nineteenth-century France?” Arthur asked, while Dom shook his head after each. “ _Seventeenth_ -century France?” 

“Absolutely standard,” said Dom, shaking his head in disgust at the department’s lack of faith in his girlfriend’s creative vision. 

“Mal accepted that?” Arthur raised his eyebrows. 

“She had to, if she wants to graduate,” said Dom. 

And Arthur knew just how badly Mal wanted to graduate. She would have tried to graduate a semester early if Dom had been able to pull it off—but of course Dom had changed majors no less than half a dozen times, and thus would barely graduate on time as it was. 

“Well, it’s a great play,” said Arthur. 

Dom pursed his lips. “I suppose.” 

“It’s _Oscar Wilde_. Even I think it’s hilarious,” Arthur argued. 

“Then you’ll agree to be my ASM?” Dom said at once.

_I see what you did there, you bastard_ , Arthur thought. 

If he told Dom “no,” he could have his pick of theatre majors to work with—any of whom would be glad to give him the stage manager position, not just the assistant. He was a junior; he’d earned the top spot by now. 

Arthur narrowed his eyes. 

“I’ll get you another ASM, so it’s not as draining for you,” Dom pleaded. “You know I can’t do this without you.” 

“Mal could get techies from the actual theatre department,” Arthur pointed out. 

“But I’m always her SM.”

“It’s her last semester, her last show. She could mix things up a bit. It might be useful for her, to have to work with a new crew.” 

“It’s her _last show_. She should be able to do it with the people she trusts.” Dom gave him a significant look. 

Arthur sighed. He knew it was a losing battle. He knew he’d lost as soon as he’d seen Dom across the quad. 

“Yes, fine,” he said. “But she’s not allowed to change her reading of it two weeks before opening, okay? If she’s running it as it would have been played in 1895—if Saito is requiring her to do it like that—then that’s how we’re doing it.” 

“ _Arthur_ —”

“No,” said Arthur, and he had to restrain himself from actually stomping a foot. “You know I’d go along with an alternate reading if it were approved. But I really don’t have time for a theatre department battle this semester, all right? So we all do this in a way that lets us keep our heads, or I don’t do it at all.” 

“Yes, fine,” said Dom, already turning away from Arthur. “I’ll email you once we’ve got a space reserved for auditions.” 

Arthur nodded, adding a mental note to check in with Dom within 24 hours to make sure that they actually acquired an audition room. 

“Oh!” Dom reached out and put a hand on Arthur’s arm, stopping him. “I was supposed to ask—don’t suppose you know if Eames will be available? He didn’t show up to student-directed auditions last semester.” 

“He was in Mombasa.”

“But he’s back now?” Dom pressed, forgetting how supremely unconcerned he'd been with Eames's whereabouts the semester before. 

“I assume so,” said Arthur, then gave in. “Yes, he is.”

“Great! Mal wants him,” Dom said unnecessarily.

Of course Mal wanted Eames, because Mal wanted to make this production as difficult as possible for Arthur without _officially_ making the production as difficult as possible for Arthur and therefore giving him reason to give up on the whole ridiculous affair before it started. 

“ _Arthur_ ,” Dom wheedled. “You know—”

“Yes, fine,” Arthur interrupted. “At least make Eames audition.” 

If Arthur were lucky, some new star would burst onto the theatre scene and steal whatever part Mal had picked for Eames. And maybe this new star would show up to rehearsals on time and actually be silent backstage and not fluster the costume crew with his incessant flirting—

But Arthur had never held much stock in luck. 

 

Three minutes before auditions were supposed to start, Arthur was running around, shoving the sign-in sheet at straggling actors and glaring at Dom, who was whispering inanely dirty things in Mal’s ear and not at all paying attention to _their_ potential actors. 

Arthur would normally have things under slightly more control, except his contacts had been bothering him all day and he’d had to run back to his dorm right before he, Mal, and Dom had planned to meet to set up.

“Darling!” called a voice from near the door. 

On instinct, Arthur’s head whipped around, and he wished he had some excuse to walk toward _anywhere else in the room_ , but Dom was busy nuzzling Mal and a few of the first-year actresses were sending coy glances at Arthur, and somehow Eames had become his best prospect. 

(Auditions hadn’t even officially begun and this was already a disaster.) 

“How was study abroad?” Arthur asked, refusing to admit that he actually knew what city Eames had been in, but also wanting to be nice on the off-chance that they could somehow cobble together a civil working relationship for the sake of the production (even though that had never worked out in the past). (Arthur had taken one glance at the hopeful assembly and resigned himself to casting Eames.) 

“Marvelous,” said Eames. He rolled his shoulders back, then shook out his arms before seeming to settle his muscles more comfortably beneath his (tight, very ugly) shirt. 

“But not marvelous enough to stay another semester?” 

“And leave you all alone for Mal’s final show?” Eames countered. 

“If you get a part,” Arthur said grumpily. 

Eames just grinned, but another boy—one who had clearly been listening in on the conversation—scowled and said, “It’s not fair, he’s already got a British accent!” 

Arthur held back a snort. 

“There’s more than one ‘British accent,’ mate,” said Eames, in a recognizably British accent that was completely different from his natural one. 

This time, Arthur let himself laugh. Eames shot him a look that was somewhere between pleased and surprised. 

The boy turned away, still glaring at Arthur suspiciously. 

“He’s afraid you’re biased, pet,” Eames said. “I haven’t the heart to tell him that if anything, you’re biased the other way.” 

“I’m a very fair person,” Arthur retorted. “And I have nothing to do with casting, anyway.” 

Eames shrugged. “Maybe that’s true for casting… but I know you influence who shows up for auditions.”

“If you’re accusing me _again_ of taking advantage of the first-year girls by not wearing a sign that says ‘I’m gay,’ that’s—” Arthur began. 

“No,” said Eames, waving a hand. “I mean, nobody who _isn’t_ a first-year would show up at all if they didn’t know you’d be involved. Nobody is willing to go through a Mal-and-Dom shitshow without the assurance that you’ll be there to reign them in before they start convincing actors to commit homicide, et cetera.” 

“Oh,” said Arthur. He wasn’t sure of exactly how effective he was against the special madness that was Mal-and-Dom working on a theatre production, but it was nice to know his efforts were at least appreciated by some. He hadn’t realized that Eames was the type of person who actually wanted to be saved, to some degree, from Mal and Dom’s Mal-and-Domness. 

“Dom called me last week, you know,” Eames continued. 

“About… auditioning?”

“About auditioning,” Eames confirmed. 

“Okay,” said Arthur. 

“And I had this whole rant prepared for why I was never going to act in one of his productions ever again—it was gold, really, Arthur, you’d love it—” Eames’s voice sped up a bit “—but Dom hinted right off that you’d be there, so I asked him, ‘Are you still working with that stick-in-the mud?’ And he said, ‘Arthur’s a good stage manager.’” Eames looked at Arthur, waiting. 

Arthur tilted his head. “I thought… that started out as a compliment, you know.” 

“You interrupted me!” Eames protested. “It was a dramatic pause. For effect.” 

Arthur crossed his arms. “Go on, then.” 

“So Dom makes his completely inadequate assessment of your abilities, and it’s possible I made some remark about how one needs imagination to properly perform Wilde—which I have in spades, as you know, make sure to mention that to Mal—but anyway, I told Dom he had it all wrong. You’re not a ‘good’ stage manager. You’re the best.” 

There was a beat. 

Arthur narrowed his eyes, scrutinizing Eames’s face, looking for the punch line. 

Eames huffed. “Never mind, darling.” 

“Was that supposed to be a compliment?” Arthur asked. 

Eames didn’t reply, his eyes focused on his shoes. (Possibly Arthur’s. Arthur’s shoes were definitely the superior set.) 

“For an actor, you suck at telling stories,” said Arthur, but he knew he was smiling. 

Eames looked up, met his gaze, then glanced away. 

“I think Mal’s looking for you,” said Eames, nodding toward the table Mal had commandeered. 

“Right,” said Arthur. “Uh, good luck.”

It was possibly their most civil conversation to date. 

Eames winked at him, and then Arthur turned away, heading for Mal. 

(Eames thought he was the _best_.) 

 

When auditions were—finally—over, Mal shuffled the papers on the desk and looked toward Arthur. 

“Eames will play Jack, of course,” she said. 

Arthur nodded. Everyone else’s auditions had paled next to the supernova of Eames’s. 

Of course Eames would play Jack: Jack, who was one of the two male leads; Jack, who was Jack in the country, but pretended his name was Ernest in the city—until it turned out that his name actually _was_ Ernest; Jack, who called everyone “dear” and “darling.” 

As Dom and Mal debated the rest of the cast list, Arthur pulled out his phone and opened a new text message. 

Technically, he shouldn’t say anything. The cast list would be posted the next day, and everyone would get to find out at the same time.

But—this wasn’t just anyone.

This was Eames. Insufferable, unfairly talented Eames. Eames, who wanted this production to go _well_. 

_Congratulations, Jack_ , Arthur typed, and hit ‘send.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You should not need to have any outside knowledge of The Importance of Being Earnest, but if you’re interested, Project Gutenberg has a copy [here](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/844/844-h/844-h.htm) and you can read the Wikipedia plot summary [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Importance_of_Being_Earnest#Synopsis). 
> 
> Different university theatre programs work differently. Suspension of disbelief!


	2. Chapter 2

Arthur crossed his arms and glared at the copy machine. 

Their first read-through was in forty-five minutes, and he needed to make twelve copies of the script by then. 

The copy machine was not cooperating. 

To be fair to the copy machine, the original script had come in a non-standard paper size, but Arthur thought he had learned everything there was to know about convincing copiers they could, in fact, copy at 80% or 90% of the original (not to mention that they loved perforated edges) when he had stage managed for his high school’s musicals. (He could still dance to all the finales, not that he was going to mention that to anyone.)

This was supposed to have been Nash’s job, Nash being the sophomore Dom had promised him as a second ASM to make Arthur’s job “easier.” 

_Fuck you, Dom_ , Arthur thought, and he knew it wasn’t even close to the last time he would think that over the course of the production. (He would have liked to at least get _to_ the read-through before the first time, though.) 

In brisk, familiar movements, Arthur tugged open no less than half a dozen parts on the copy machine, relieving at least one crumpled or smudged piece of paper from each cranny. He let the papers fall into the recycling bin (already a quarter full with his failed attempts).

“Okay,” he said, glaring at the machine’s screen. “Work with me here.” 

Behind him, the door to the tiny theatre office swung open. 

“Making friends, are we, darling?” Eames asked, sliding around him and hopping up on the counter, which was _supposed_ to be covered with hot-off-the-press scripts. 

Arthur took a deep breath. 

He really, really did not have time for Eames right now. 

“What do you need?” Arthur asked, his voice flat. 

“What makes you think I need anything?” Eames parried, a pout in his voice. (Arthur refused to turn his head to check.) 

“You’re very early,” said Arthur. “The read-through doesn’t start for forty-one minutes.” 

“Excellent,” said Eames. 

Arthur waited, but Eames didn’t explain himself. 

“Excellent,” Arthur repeated, still staring at the screen, wondering what new combination of buttons to press in order to maybe, finally, achieve the necessary results. If such a combination existed at all. 

“Yes, exactly,” said Eames. And began to hum. 

Seriously, _hum_. 

And not just mindless humming, no, but an actual tune—more than just a tune—an actual song—a song that had haunted Arthur for the past four years because there were really only so many times you could hear a number before it started to quietly drive you—

“ _Little Shop_ , really?” Arthur said. 

“Not a fan?” Eames asked. 

“The set almost collapsed in the middle of Act Two,” Arthur said. “I was calling the show and suddenly I could see it start to wobble—we had these rolling walls around the shop portion, don’t ask—and I had to coordinate with the backstage crew while making sure the spots kept hitting their cues. I had stress nightmares about it for weeks.”

“I would have liked to meet poor seventeen-year-old Artie,” Eames mused. 

At this, Arthur did turn his head. To glare. 

“No one calls or has _ever_ called me ‘Artie,’” he sniffed. 

(Technically, his Great Aunt Priscilla called him ‘Artie,’ but Eames didn’t need to know that.) 

“I have to differentiate myself somehow, don’t I, sweetheart?” Eames countered. 

Arthur turned back to his screen, tapped in a series of commands that hopefully would result in something useable, and hit ‘enter.’ 

“Seventeen-year-old me isn’t really all that different from current me,” Arthur said. 

His seventeen-year-old self was actually depressingly similar to his current self. 

_Still uptight, still taking over group projects, still not able to take a joke…_

“I would have liked to meet you at seventeen,” Eames repeated. 

The copy machine jammed, but—Arthur rifled through the half a script that had printed before this latest tantrum. It was perfect. 

Beside him, Eames began to hum— _Oliver!_ this time. 

 

“Thanks for coming, everyone,” Mal said from her place at the head of the table. 

Dom sat on her right; Arthur, to Dom’s right. 

Everyone was here; everyone had scripts; everyone (now) had a pencil. 

“Let’s do some quick introductions,” Mal continued. “We need to start learning each other as soon as possible. We will become a family—”

 _A dysfunctional one, sure_ , Arthur thought, as Nash, beside him, squirmed in his chair. 

Arthur flipped open his notebook to a new page, writing the date and READ-THROUGH in large letters across the top. 

“—and that begins today. We need to know each other, every little bit. How you breathe. How we breathe, together. What the position of your shoulders says about what you’re going to do next…”

Eames’s shoulders, Arthur noted objectively, were very nice shoulders. As shoulders went. 

(Arthur never knew what Eames was going to do next.) 

“A play is a journey, and we must trust each other enough to continue it, day after day, night after night. A play is a dream that we construct together. A play is a crime, a grift, the greatest heist one can ever accomplish, and this is your team.” Mal smiled at them, slowly, seductively, meeting the gaze of everyone around the table, one by one. “Now. Name, year, major, role… and something surprising about yourself. I’ll start.” 

As they worked their way around the table, Arthur noted the names of the actors he hadn’t worked with before, which was about half of them. 

Far too soon, Nash stumbled through something about an allergy or medical incident or lack thereof, and everyone’s eyes landed on Arthur. 

“Arthur, junior, Organizational Studies major, French and architecture minors, assistant stage manager,” he said, and turned to Dom. 

“Hey, everyone, I’m Dom—” Dom began, but Eames interrupted him. 

“Excuse me, but Arthur didn’t say his surprising fact yet,” Eames said. His tone was serious, but his full lips were pulled into a smirk. 

“I don’t think it’s necessary,” said Arthur, his tone level. “I’m on tech crew, I won’t be on stage with all of you. My job is to be very unsurprising.”

“Darling,” Eames began, and Arthur had to restrain himself from rolling his eyes, because now half the cast was going to assume they were together (this always happened, Eames did this on purpose, Arthur was sure of it) and it would be weeks before they would believe otherwise. “That’s not really in the spirit of what Mal’s trying to do here, is it?” 

Arthur held Eames’s gaze for a long moment, because bringing Mal into it was playing dirty. 

“I have never baked cookies that didn’t come out burned,” Arthur huffed, looking away from Eames to watch the reactions of the rest of the cast. Arthur knew if he could display just one tiny, “human” (as Dom liked to say) flaw, they’d forgive him for demanding perfection in every other area. 

(Arthur should be good at cooking—baking—really. Food preparation was all planning and measuring and timing, and Arthur was ace at all of that. Most of the time, he managed all right, and, frankly, his crème brulée was to die for and he made a superb cheesecake—but cookies still eluded him. The universe conspired against him every time he tried.) 

“You are a delightful creature,” Eames proclaimed. 

Arthur sighed and looked pointedly toward Dom. 

Five minutes later, a few final surprises and a last metaphor for theatre out of the way, Arthur thought they were perhaps going to open their (painstakingly copied) scripts at last. 

“I know you all came for the read-through, but we’re going to push that back for half an hour so we can do a warm-up,” Mal announced. 

Arthur narrowed his eyes and pressed his hands flat against the table in an effort to stop them from tugging his hair out in frustration. (It was only the first meeting. It was really far too early to begin stressing himself into premature baldness.) 

He and Dom had carefully drafted a rehearsal schedule the night before, and today’s plan did not include whatever detour Mal had selected. 

“Oh, good,” said Robert, the sophomore playing Algernon, the other male lead. 

Mal stood and walked toward the other side of the room, which was empty of furniture. She was wearing a slim, dark dress, just this side of too formal for a theatre meeting. 

Their shared fashion sense, of course, was what had drawn Arthur and Mal together in their French class, Arthur’s first semester of college. He had been the only freshman in the upper-division course, and he and Mal had quickly gone from admiring the other’s outfits to dissecting Proust over lunch to Mal more or less platonically moving into Arthur’s room. 

It had been a heady semester for Arthur, full of Mal and her Parisian stories on the one hand, and, on the other, the haplessness of his equally new, second best friend, whom he’d met when they’d been partnered for a microeconomics project. 

Mal had moved out of Arthur’s room second semester (to the disappointment of Arthur’s roommate), once the two halves of Arthur’s world had collided into a coupledom that the pair in question, at least, believed was worthy of the capital-r Romantics themselves—and once Arthur had found alternate accommodations for Dom’s roommate. (In the process, Arthur had ended up solving half a dozen other people’s housing problems, which had both gained him a bit of a cult following and annoyed the housing office, even though he was doing their job for them. It had been an illuminating experience, all told. )

And it wasn’t that Dom and Mal had ceased to be Arthur’s friends, not at all. It was just that that second semester also corresponded with the first play they had all worked on together, and it had been very close to a complete disaster, and Arthur had realized he needed a little space from the overwhelming _themness_ of them. 

“Everyone over here, with me, please,” Mal said. “I think a little improvisation is just what we need.” 

Everyone else stood up; Arthur remained seated, flipping through his notebook, frowning at his color-coded to-do list. 

“ _Everyone_ ,” Mal repeated loudly. 

Arthur looked up. The cast, along with Dom and Nash, were standing in a rough circle on the other side of the room. 

“I’m on crew,” Arthur said flatly.

“And don’t you agree that stage managers need to be able to improvise?” Mal asked sweetly. 

“Improvise how to repair a chair during a seven-second scene change,” said Arthur.

 _Or how to put out a literal fire on stage in the middle of a scene_ , he added to himself. 

“Get over here,” said Mal, and Arthur did. 

He didn’t want to get into a power struggle about a stupid improv exercise on the very first day. There would be decisions he would actually have to put his foot down about later on, and he wasn’t going to waste a victory on improv. 

Robert and the girl playing Cecily parted to make room for him in the circle. Not quite enough room, he noticed, because Robert’s shoulder was brushing his and Arthur was a believer in personal space and he was _not_ going to put up with this for an entire rehearsal, much less the length of production. 

Across the room, Eames winked at him. 

Naturally, Mal picked a game that required pairs. 

“Partners, darling?” Eames said at once, striding across the circle. 

Robert coughed; Arthur ignored him. 

“I thought you’d never ask,” Arthur said grimly, and tugged Eames away from the pouting Robert. 

 

The read-through—when they finally got around to it—went well enough. 

There was a lot of characterization work ahead of them, of course, but they read fluidly, and the actress playing Gwendolen already had an appropriate and passable British accent, and all together they were engaging enough to make Nash laugh, and Eames—

Well. 

Eames was the best.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so we had intermission to fix the chair, but I'm really not making any of this up. (Even Organizational Studies.)


	3. Chapter 3

“Robert is _where_?” Arthur demanded, as Dom hung up the phone. 

“His dad wanted him home for some business thing,” Dom said, shrugging. 

“We’re blocking tonight,” Arthur said. “We’re blocking one of his scenes tonight, and he’s not even here?” 

“You know his dad…” Dom said.

“I do,” said Arthur, because one could not work with Robert for even a short couple of weeks without learning something about his dad, and Robert’s dad was a jerk, no questions asked, but, really, over a month into the semester? On a _weeknight_? “He doesn’t have to be such a pushover all the time.” 

Mal looked up from the table where she was conferring with Eames. “Arthur.” 

“Our schedule—” Arthur began, then stopped himself. “Okay, can we get anyone else in tonight? So we can at least get something done?” 

Silence. 

Arthur glared at the other three as he pulled up the synced calendar on his phone. 

“That’s a no,” Arthur answered. 

“We’ll have to block the scene without him,” Mal said. 

Arthur sighed. They would have to, Mal was right, but blocking scenes without one of the principal actors in it always ended up being a disaster, and trying to learn a scene from someone else’s notes, rather than from walking through it together, made the movements that much harder to remember. 

“You’ll fill in for him, darling?” Eames prompted, pushing away from the table. 

Arthur had filled in for many parts during his high schools years, when casts tended to be larger and the actors less reliable. His freshman year, on separate rehearsal days, he’d played both the unattainable love interest and the unattainable love interest’s fiancée (don’t ask). He’d tangoed with the dentist in _Little Shop of Horrors_ and unenthusiastically called for revolution in _Les Mis_. In terms of pure numbers, his acting C.V. was almost as full as a bona fide actor’s. 

He felt sure that none of this would prepare him for blocking a scene with Eames. 

“What a wonderful idea,” Mal beamed. 

“Yes, fine,” said Arthur, because he knew if Dom were to fill in, the notes would be impossible for Robert to understand, even though there was a _system that wasn’t difficult to follow_ regarding stage directions.

_Now would be a good time to be grateful the department didn’t approve any alternate readings_ , Arthur told himself. 

Blocking the scene, as Arthur might have predicted, involved a lot of Eames maneuvering him from one part of the makeshift stage to the next (seeing as how they couldn’t move into the actual theatre yet), constantly asking for Mal’s opinion on _exactly_ where Algernon needed to be “so I can help Robert, you know, when he gets back.” Arthur was also fairly certain that Jack did not do as much suggestive eyebrow waggling as Eames did, but, really, what else could one expect from Eames? 

 

Apparently, what one could expect from Eames was that Eames would determine when and where one usually got breakfast. And then, every few days, take this opportunity to crash one’s only peaceful half-hour of the day. 

Arthur didn’t know what to make of this. He didn’t know what to do when Eames complained that the selection of fresh fruit was abysmally repetitive and that even he could make better hash browns and, also, his painting professor was killing him but, like, in a good way. 

Arthur spent most of these sporadically shared breakfasts with his chair tipped onto the back two legs, which meant he could pretend the swooping feeling in his stomach came only from the sensation that he was one thoughtless movement away from falling.

 

Arthur was on his way to the library, hoping to squeeze in a few desperate hours of work before rehearsal, when a loud “Darling!” stopped him in the middle of the quad. 

He turned around, searching for Eames and ignoring the smirks of passersby. 

“Hi,” said Eames, coming up behind him, because it was more or less written in the laws of the universe that Eames was not permitted to appear from the expected direction. 

“Hi,” said Arthur. 

Eames stuck his hands in his pockets, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. 

“Do you… need something?” Arthur asked after a moment. 

“Always,” Eames said at once. 

“Okay…” said Arthur. 

“That’s a yes? Thank you, sweetheart!” Eames winked. 

Arthur rolled his eyes. “That’s a, ‘go ahead and tell me what you want.’”

“It’s a _need_ , not a want,” Eames complained. 

“If you say so,” said Arthur.

“I do.”

Arthur waited again. 

“Where are you headed?” Eames asked, finally. 

“Library,” said Arthur, suspicious. 

Eames nodded and began to walk in the appropriate direction. 

“Um,” said Arthur, hurrying after him. “So, you need…?” 

“Oh, right,” said Eames, and Arthur kind of wanted to shake him. “Help me memorize my lines?” 

“Now?” Arthur asked plaintively, because he had a big assignment due the next day and had really been counting on his library time. 

“Not right now,” said Eames. “But, you know, when you have a chance.” 

“We’re off-book in a week and a half,” said Arthur. 

“Indeed we are,” said Eames. “So preferably sometime before then.” 

“Right,” said Arthur. “How much time do you need?”

“Hm?”

“How long is this going to take? I need to know how much time to schedule,” said Arthur, stopping outside the library and tugging his notebook from his backpack.

“I haven’t really started yet…” said Eames. 

“ _What_ ,” Arthur yelped, because they were off-book in just over a _week_ and one of their leads hadn’t started memorizing yet and there were few words that could instill such fear in the heart of a stage manager. It wasn’t as if the deadline was unexpected: Eames had already had over a month to memorize his lines.

Eames shrugged; Arthur seethed. Shrugging was not an adequate response to the disaster Eames had so casually thrust upon him. 

“Who normally helps you with this?” Arthur asked, taking a deep breath. 

They could do this. He could do this. Arthur had helped far more hopeless actors than Eames over the years. 

Eames rubbed a hand through his hair, which in Arthur’s opinion was no more helpful than a shrug. 

“I find someone pretty who won’t mind having the same conversation with me over and over again, darling,” said Eames. 

Arthur swallowed. He was a stage manager; it was his job to help Eames and ensure that the production ran smoothly… but he didn’t want to be second—or fourth—or last—choice in anyone’s book. Even Eames’s. (Especially Eames’s?) (No, best not to go down that road.) 

“So what went wrong this time?” Arthur asked. He was beginning to shiver, because they were still standing outside the library and he still hadn’t gotten anything done this afternoon and he wasn’t going to, either, if Eames continued to drag the conversation out. 

“No one was quite pretty enough,” said Eames. 

“Your aesthetic standards and appalling reliance on physical appearance are _not_ an excuse for not memorizing your lines, and if you—” Arthur began. 

“But you’ll help, won’t you?” Eames interrupted. 

“I already said yes,” said Arthur. “You still need to tell me how long it’s going to take.” 

“However long you need,” said Eames. 

“I think you’ve got it backwards.” 

“Oh, no, I assure you, petal—when are you free?” 

Arthur glanced down at his notebook, even though he had his schedule memorized, obviously.

“I’m out of class at 2:30 tomorrow,” he said. “You can have an hour then and we’ll go from there.” 

They could get a scene or two done in an hour, right?

“Excellent,” said Eames. “Your room or mine?” 

Arthur wrinkled his nose. After coming back from abroad, Eames had been placed in a double, and Arthur was not a fan of Eames’s roommate. 

Eames had left his script at rehearsal one night, and Arthur had offered to bring it to him, because Eames’s dorm was quite close to Arthur’s. There had been some misunderstanding about the time, so Eames hadn’t been in—but his roommate had. His roommate had also been very drunk and very loud and generally rude about Arthur interrupting his pre-gaming. 

Arthur had not felt the least remorse in interrupting the drinking ritual, especially given the fact that Eames’s roommate had, for some reason, decided that the interruption was an appropriate excuse to go off on the degeneracy of people who did theatre. It had taken several minutes to persuade him to permit Arthur to leave the script on Eames’s desk. In short, as first impressions went, it was not a very good one. 

“The theatre,” Arthur said firmly. “I’ll head over straight after class. Don’t keep me waiting.” 

“As if I ever would,” said Eames. “Now go get your work done, or you’ll be insufferable at rehearsal.” 

Before Arthur could protest that the delay was all Eames’s fault, Eames had pulled open the library door and gently pushed Arthur inside. 

Arthur turned—to thank Eames, or maybe to invite him to share his library table like that wouldn’t be a recipe for disaster—but the door was already swinging shut between them and Eames had begun to walk away.


	4. Chapter 4

Eames wasn’t late, which was about the only good thing that had happened to Arthur all day. (One of his professors had decided their next test would include an extra chapter but wouldn’t be delayed; Nash was out with the flu so he wouldn’t even be at rehearsal for the next few days to handle the busywork while Arthur tugged Cobb through the work that actually had to be done; the cafeteria had diverted from its usual Monday lunch menu and Arthur was feeling bereft because cafeteria schedules were supposed to be the one thing in life you could count on.) 

In fact, Eames was early, sitting on the edge of the stage and swinging his legs when Arthur walked in. 

“Hullo, sweetheart,” said Eames, his voice carrying easily over the empty rows. 

“Hi,” said Arthur. 

“Did you bring your script?” Eames asked. 

“Did you not bring yours?” Arthur parried. 

“Theoretically, we only need one,” Eames pointed out.

“In that case, it should be yours, so you can make notes to yourself,” said Arthur. He set his backpack down on the floor. “Yes, I have my script, and if you’ve lost yours, I am not making you another copy.”

(He would make Nash make another copy.) 

(Well. He would make Nash attempt to make another copy. Arthur would probably have to make the actual copy himself.) 

“You have no faith in me,” Eames pouted, tugging his binder out from beneath the sweatshirt crumpled beside him. 

Arthur sighed. Although he would never, ever admit this to Eames, not even under pain of death, he knew that the real issue was that Eames was an all-or-nothing kind of natural disaster, and if Arthur did not continually grind his own hope beneath a ruthless heel, it would be so, so easy to believe in Eames—to have faith in him endlessly, effortlessly, about everything. 

“You’re welcome to change my mind,” said Arthur, taking a seat in the front row. 

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Eames. 

_About the play_ , Arthur reminded himself, his inner voice vicious. _About the lines._

“Where do you want to start?” Arthur asked. 

“First scene?” Eames suggested. 

Arthur bit back a groan. “Really? You’re not even going to pretend that you’ve started learning this?” 

“Would you prefer me to lie?”

“No,” Arthur admitted. “Fine, first scene. Impress me.” 

Arthur had never before helped Eames with his lines, so he didn’t know the method by which Eames usually learned them, but Eames didn’t learn (or rather, forget) his lines like the other actors Arthur had painstakingly coached through scene after scene over the years. 

Eames would be word-perfect until he abruptly stopped, calling “Line” and looking expectantly at Arthur. 

Sometimes, a single syllable from Arthur would be enough of a prompt to carry them through half a page or more of flawless dialogue; sometimes, Eames would coax the entire line out of Arthur, word by word.

Even more confusingly, Eames was actually worse on the second run-through than he’d been on the first—although the places he called “Line” weren’t always the same. 

Eventually, Eames said, “Don’t you have to go soon, darling? I wouldn’t want to disrupt your schedule.” 

Arthur glanced at his watched, startled. He hadn’t realized that their hour was almost up. 

“We have time for once more, if we don’t stop.” He raised one eyebrow, a challenge. 

Eames winked—and nailed every single line. 

“Well?” Eames asked. 

“I admit, I am… impressed,” said Arthur, slowly, because he was also confused. 

“Your condescension, as always, is much appreciated, darling,” said Eames, but he smiled, so Arthur didn’t think Eames was actually offended. 

“Okay,” said Arthur. “When do you want to go through the rest?” 

Eames hopped off the edge of the stage and plucked Arthur’s notebook from his lap.

(From his _lap_.) 

“Wednesday at three?” Eames suggested. 

Arthur peered at his schedule. “Fine.” 

“Excellent,” said Eames, pulling a pen out of nowhere and scribbling BE IMPRESSED BY EAMES in the appropriate spot. 

“Really?” commented Arthur.

“Really,” said Eames. “See you at rehearsal!” 

Eames whistled as he snagged his script off the stage and cut through a side door. 

Arthur looked down again at his notebook. 

_BE IMPRESSED BY EAMES_. 

Fuck.

 

“You need to find a new roommate,” Arthur told Eames over dinner on Thursday. 

Mal had scheduled a special character rehearsal for that night, and Eames had been bombarding Arthur with texts. Half of them were complaints about the other actors; half were complaints about his roommate. Arthur had finally broken down and suggested that Eames rant to him about it over food. 

Arthur thought this was logical, because this way they could both eat before rehearsal, and hopefully Eames would keep most of his acting criticisms—or at least the biting tone of them—to himself during the actual meeting, if he were able to tell _someone_ about them. 

“I know,” said Eames. “He’s awful, isn’t he? I’m so sorry you had to go through the Drunk Ethan experience. Well, early stage Drunk Ethan. Late stage Drunk Ethan—or is that early stage Hungover Ethan? I’m not really sure—is much worse. Lots of vomit.” 

Arthur stared. “You need to talk to housing. I’m serious.” 

“Thinking about it,” said Eames. 

“ _Eames_.” 

“He’s out a lot? So that helps,” Eames offered. 

Arthur groaned. “My first year, Mal’s roommate was completely insane—like, constantly trashing their room, never sleeping insane. Plus, Ian’s roommate sold crack out of their room, and Dom’s roommate had some weird sock thing that I’m not even going to get into, but it was way more of a problem than you would believe. And I got them all out, one way or the other, and I still have dirt on the housing coordinator. So—”

“I’ll talk to Ethan first. See if we can work something out,” said Eames. 

“Fine,” said Arthur. “But I’m not dropping this.”

“I would expect nothing less.” 

 

The first off-book rehearsal of Act I came after a weekend of snatched memorization hours in which Eames, without fail, would pull off a flawless run-through right before he had to leave for his shift at the Student Union or Arthur had to meet with his partners for the group project that was going to slay him (if he didn’t slay his partners first, and maybe even then).

Arthur hoped that Eames would be the least of his worries come their first rehearsal off-book. Even without the hours of official memorization practice, Arthur would know that Eames knew his lines: he kept reciting his scenes at Arthur over breakfast ad nauseum. Arthur was far less confident in Robert’s ability to pull it off, and even less in the governess’s, despite her comparatively few scenes. 

Normally around this point in production, Arthur would duck out of rehearsal and accomplish important things, leaving Dom (who wouldn’t leave Mal) and Nash to watch, but Arthur made it a point to control the script during the first few days off-book. Plus, this arrangement freed up Dom to have (whispered) meetings with the other crew heads to discuss their progress.

“Let’s go from the top,” said Mal, after they’d finished their warm-up stretches. “If you have to call ‘line,’ fine, but don’t break character, don’t look at Arthur. At the end of rehearsal, check in with him about what lines you missed. Mark those in your script, take it home, work on it. If he has to circle the same line more than three times this week, we’ll have a conversation. Ready, Arthur?” 

Arthur flipped his pencil through his fingers. “Ready.” 

Mal nodded. “Lane, Algernon, first scene.” 

And so it began, and in such a stilted fashion that Arthur breathed a sigh of relief when Eames’s character finally made his entrance (and given that Jack entered not too far into the scene, Arthur should perhaps be concerned over his inclination to use the word ‘finally’).

“‘… I’ll certainly try to forget the fact,’” said Robert, on stage. 

“‘I have no doubt about that, darling,’” Eames replied, and if Arthur had ever before doubted that a single wink could shatter the fourth wall, those doubts were now laid to rest. “‘The Divorce Court…’”

“‘Dear Algy,’” Arthur interrupted, once he had recovered. 

“‘… was specially invented for people whose memories are so curiously constituted,’” Eames plowed on. 

Arthur slumped back into his seat and circled ‘dear Algy.’ 

In Act One, Jack refers to his companion as ‘dear Algy’ four times. Throughout that first rehearsal, though, Eames’s Jack never failed to substitute. Arthur broke his pencil circling the last one (“That, my darling, is the whole truth pure and simple.”).

“Great work, everybody,” Mal called, as Eames made his final Act One exit. “Check in with Arthur about your line issues—Robert, find a study partner, _mon Dieu_ , you’d think you’d never had to learn lines before.”

Arthur kept his eyes carefully on his script. He wanted the show to be successful, of course, and he wished Robert well—but he had a feeling coaching Robert would be far less enjoyable, and far less instantly rewarding, than coaching Eames had been. 

(Wait. Was he playing favorites? He wasn’t allowed to play favorites. And if he were playing favorites, why in the world would he pick _Eames_?) 

“Arthur’s great at that sort of thing,” Dom volunteered, not looking up from the rehearsal report he was filling out. “He probably has the whole show memorized already.” 

Arthur turned to glare at Dom, but before he could speak (to say what?), Eames jumped in. 

“Sorry, Robert, but Arthur’s already taken,” he said. 

Robert stared at Eames. (So did Arthur, but, well, could you blame him?) 

“I’ve already commandeered his memorization help, and I’m afraid he really doesn’t have time for the both of us, don’t you agree, Arthur?” Eames plowed on. “Nash, you’d better help him. We wouldn’t want dear Arthur to become overwhelmed with all of the demands we lazy actors make on his time.” 

Considering that Nash’s entire purpose in the production was supposedly to make Arthur’s life easier (ha), Arthur thought this plan was rather brilliant.

Or. Not brilliant, it was nothing more than optimal personnel distribution, but, satisfactory. Logical. 

“Have Nash help you,” Arthur agreed, and ignored the crestfallen look on Robert’s face. 

Lady Bracknell came over for her line notes, and for a few minutes Arthur happily ignored whatever staring contest Eames and Robert were currently engaged in. 

After her and Lane’s departure, however, the other pair approached him, both smiling. Eames dropped languidly into the seat beside him; Robert hovered awkwardly in front of Arthur. 

Arthur glanced between them. “Who wants their notes first?” 

“Eames can go first,” said Robert, in what he evidently felt was a generous tone. 

“Aw, pet, you know I was word-perfect. What with all the time we spent on it, I couldn’t be anything less,” said Eames. 

“Jack calls _Gwendolen_ ‘darling,’” Arthur sighed. “Not Algernon.” 

“I think Mal cast me on the strength of my ‘darling,’” Eames mused. 

“Probably,” Robert snapped. 

“I am sorry for the misplaced ‘darlings,’” said Eames, not sounding sorry at all. “It’s my favorite line, but really five times doesn’t seem like quite enough, and as actors, we have to trust our instincts, don’t we, Robert?”

Robert glared. 

“Moving on,” said Arthur. “Robert. The Bunbury section in particular needs some work—you can’t lose the thread of the scene every time your line is more than a sentence long.” 

“I prefer fast dialogue,” Robert sniffed. 

Eames—who, perplexingly, had yet to leave Arthur’s side—snorted. 

“Well, Algernon occasionally has to explain things,” said Arthur, ignoring Eames. 

“Nash is useless,” Robert proclaimed. “Can’t you help me instead? Now that Eames has his lines memorized so well, I’m sure he won’t need to be monopolizing your time this week.” 

Although privately Arthur agreed that Nash was useless, stage managers had to stand in solidarity with each other against the ungrateful swines that lost their props, missed their cues, destroyed their sets—and received the bulk of the applause. 

“I’m really busy this week,” said Arthur. “Sorry. If you don’t want to have Nash help you, find someone else. Make your roommate do it with you, as a study break.”

“I don’t have a roommate,” said Robert, because of course he didn’t have a roommate, why would Robert Fischer ever have a roommate? 

“Someone, then,” said Arthur firmly. He closed his script. 

“It’s really great, not having a roommate,” Robert continued. “Nobody leaving their stuff all over your side, or being nosy, or interrupting you when you’re… busy.” 

Arthur was about one sentence away from banging his head against the stage floor. 

“Congratulations,” he said instead. “Open lines of communication usually work well, too.”

Arthur stood and began to pack up his things. Neither Robert nor Eames moved. 

As he shouldered his bag, he said, “I need to lock up, so, I’m kicking you both out.” 

“Oh, right,” said Robert, who began to follow him toward the exit. 

“I’ve slept in a theatre before,” said Eames, but he joined them in their walk up the center aisle. 

“I’m sure it’s a very amusing story, ninety percent of it lies and all of it an attempt to romanticize your teenage delinquency as charmingly British,” Robert snapped. 

“Um,” said Arthur. 

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” said Eames, without missing a beat. 

“Um,” said Arthur again, because, first, Robert was definitely not allowed to talk about Eames that way, and second, was Eames quoting Oscar Wilde? Eames was quoting Oscar bloody Wilde. Casually.

“It’s fine,” said Eames. “This is theatre, we’re actors. And, of course, we’re _family_ , and families have to be honest with each other.” 

Robert snorted. 

“Functional families are _mostly_ honest with each other,” Arthur amended, because his father’s lies had definitely not contributed to the functionality of their family unit for the four years of his life during which his father had been vaguely around, and he and his mother had developed a successful habit of telling each other white lies to stop the other from worrying too much. Just like he had told his mom he was perfectly happy to come home for spring break next week, even though he knew Eames was staying on campus and Ian had invited him to go to Yellowstone with his family. 

“Which way are you headed?” Robert asked as they stepped out into the brisk night. 

“I live in Avery,” Arthur replied. 

Robert made a face. “Shame, I’m in Wilbur.”

Wilbur was in the opposite direction from Avery, but about four times closer to the theatre. 

“We’ll see you later, then,” Eames said, moving closer to Arthur. Eames lived in Clark, the residence hall directly across from Avery. 

“Goodnight,” said Robert, but he looked only at Arthur as he spoke. 

Arthur nodded and turned away. Would this night never end? 

“I can deal with Robert on my own, you know,” he told Eames as the other fell into step beside him. 

“You sure, darling?” 

“Yes,” said Arthur. “I’d tell you that you’re welcome to get him to back off _you_ except that you should really save it until after the show.” 

“Can’t have your lead actors trying to sabotage each other?”

“Don’t even think about it—Mal didn’t cast understudies.” Arthur shuddered. “Seriously, I’m sorry he was so rude to you.”

Eames shrugged. “You’ve got nothing to apologize for, sweetheart.” 

Arthur sighed and let them drift into silence. 

It hit him, suddenly, walking across the quiet campus, both of them automatically turning for the same shortcuts, how easy this was. 

How easy it would be to have a routine with Eames—and then, abruptly, Arthur realized he already had a routine with Eames, because the one emergency, pre-rehearsal strategy dinner had turned into a recurring event on Arthur’s calendar, not to mention breakfast debriefs whenever Eames could roll himself out of bed, an occurrence that was happening with more and more frequency. 

The day before, Eames had proposed formalizing the arrangement (“This way you know I’m coming and don’t get mad at me for interrupting your intimate half-hour with your oatmeal”). Eames had claimed that the meals were a way to make sure they were on the same page about the show and didn’t start yelling at each other in the middle of rehearsal, which they had often done over the course of every other prior production.

And the meals worked so well, too well, because Arthur had _missed_ Eames the one day they’d had off from rehearsal and thus left him without an excuse to meet up with Eames.

Now he and Eames were practically walking _home_ together, Eames a solid, quiet presence at his side, and Arthur could only just barely make out his features in the moonlight, but he didn’t need the moonlight at all, he already knew Eames, every bit of him—

_Fuck_ , Arthur thought. 

Falling for Eames was definitely not part of the plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Wilde quote is from his play Lady Windermere’s Fan.


	5. Chapter 5

Arthur returned from spring break to discover that despite the straight reading—or perhaps because of it—Mal had some mysterious hold over the department, which meant they had a decent budget for the set and costumes. 

A few weeks before opening, Mal called them in on a Saturday afternoon for set-painting purposes. ( _Wear clothes you can get paint on. Or just go without—Eames would help you wash_ , Mal had texted him the day before. _I’ll wear the_ Private Lives _t-shirt_ , Arthur had replied, a little viciously, because the props and set for that show had been such a mismanaged and shoddy disaster that the actors ended up improvising half their scenes to explain away whatever the most recent on-stage accident was. Also, referencing the play was a not-so-subtle hint for Mal to _lay off_ because they were _not discussing Eames_ , and the poor decisions made by Arthur’s stupid heart were _private_ , even though they really weren’t, because Mal was still mostly his best friend, at least outside of play season.) 

“Do my eyes deceive me?” Eames called as soon as Arthur entered the theatre. 

Eames, Arthur noticed, was wearing a thin, obviously much-washed concert t-shirt and jeans whose hems made Arthur want to call for a scissors, needle, and thread. 

“So nice to see you, too,” said Arthur dryly, dumping his bag in the front row and hopping onstage. 

“Your jeans have holes in them, darling,” said Eames, eyeing Arthur’s knees. 

“Indeed, they do,” Arthur said. “Blame _Frankenstein_.” 

Before Eames could reply, Ariadne—a dark-haired sophomore Arthur had met in his fall architecture class—bounded onstage, coffee in one hand and papers in the other. 

“People!” she called, looking out over the audience, where most of the cast was assembled. “I have your assignments here”—she waved the papers in the air—“so come see me. We’re _finishing_ this list today, so don’t even think about skipping out before you’re done. If you have a problem with your assignment, find someone to switch with you. Don’t point power tools at each other. There will be no injuries on my watch, understood? Any questions? Great, let’s go.” 

“You’re welcome for the coffee,” Eames said, crossing the stage toward Ariadne. 

Arthur followed. (He had to get his assignment, anyway.)

“I wouldn’t have needed the coffee if someone hadn’t kept me up last night blabbering on about a certain obsession of his,” Ariadne said pointedly. 

“I thought we were friends,” Eames complained. 

“Yeah,” said Ariadne. “Which is why you definitely owed me the coffee. Now we’re even.” 

“She’s so mean to me,” Eames said, now turning to Arthur. 

“Uh,” said Arthur. 

“I’d love to chitchat all day, but I have multiple dining room sets to procure,” Ariadne interrupted. “You two are on painting duty. Yusuf is setting up the scaffold so you can start from the top.”

_No no no_ , Arthur thought. 

“I don’t do scaffolds,” he said. 

“I’m sorry?” said Ariadne. “Eames, deal with Arthur. I need to explain the rest of the assignments.” Before Arthur could protest, Ariadne slipped off the stage and began shouting orders to the rest of the cast. 

“I will hold the scaffold,” Arthur said firmly. 

“It’s not a ladder,” said Eames. “It doesn’t need to be held.” 

“Yes, it does,” said Arthur. “It’s wobbly and impermanent.” 

Eames raised his eyebrows. 

“Do you guys need help?” Robert asked from behind Arthur. 

“No,” said Eames. 

“What’s your assignment?” Arthur asked, turning. 

“Helping Yusuf change the lights,” Robert said, “But first, Ariadne wanted me to bring you the paint.”

He set down a large bucket of paint, along with two rollers, a tub for the paint, and a drop cloth. 

“Thanks,” said Arthur, and wondered why the one person he could easily convince to switch with him had the one job he desired less than painting. 

( _You’re not allowed to manipulate Robert_ , Arthur reminded himself. _It’s rude to take advantage of people’s unrequited feelings._ ) 

“She says just do the whole thing… some art majors will do the design on top, but first they just need this background texture layer,” Robert continued. 

Arthur looked back at the enormous wall in front of them. It was going to be a long afternoon. A long afternoon—a long semester—all for two performances—and they were lucky they got two. Most directing capstone projects were only allowed to commandeer the stage for one night. 

“I don’t think Yusuf needs me yet, so I can help,” said Robert.

“There are only two brushes,” Eames pointed out.

“You two go up, I’ll hold the scaffold,” said Arthur at once. 

Both boys frowned at him. 

“It’s perfectly secure,” said Eames. 

“If that’s what you’d prefer, I’m in,” said Robert, in that jovial, I’m-so-generous tone Arthur was starting to both recognize and detest. 

“But then of course it will be very disruptive when you have to leave to help Yusuf,” said Eames. “So maybe you should hold the scaffold.” 

Arthur glared at Eames. 

“Oh, all right,” said Robert. 

“Darling, what say you?” asked Eames. 

Instead of replying, Arthur began prying the paint can open. 

Five minutes and only a small amount of spilled paint later, Eames and Arthur stood on the scaffold, roller brushes in hand. 

As Eames stretched to his left, the scaffold shifted slightly. Arthur flinched and immediately fell into a crouch, holding onto a bar with his roller-free hand. 

“ _Hold_ the thing, Robert,” Arthur shouted, not looking down. 

“I am!” Robert called up. “Eames keeps moving unexpectedly.” 

“We’re painting,” argued Eames. “Not that hard to watch the wall and see where the unpainted spots are.” 

Arthur turned his head, slowly, to glare at Eames, who was still standing. “Move slower.” 

“Anything for you, pet,” Eames replied cheerfully. 

After another moment, Arthur stood again and continued to paint his section of the wall. 

Arthur had more or less managed to avoid scaffolds throughout his time in college, but he was now forced to confront the uncomfortable reality of how _small_ scaffold platforms were. Arthur felt constantly in danger of knocking over the paint, and, more dire than that, constantly in danger of brushing up against Eames, who was _everywhere_. Fluid, languid in his movements, of course, as always, but—Eames was broad and muscled and there was nowhere for all that to go except for into Arthur’s space. 

Plus they were twelve feet off the ground. 

Arthur didn’t have a problem with heights, not exactly, but he had a big problem with falling. Eames refused to stay still, which meant the scaffold refused to stay still. Some people might not think of twelve feet as particularly high, but a twelve-foot fall was enough to cause fatal brain damage. (So Arthur memorized news stories about fatal falling accidents; Arthur maintained that keeping himself informed was also the best way to keep himself alive.)

Arthur held onto the railing with his left hand and stretched his right hand as far as he could without feeling unbalanced. So maybe he wasn’t pressing the roller quite as firmly as could be desired against the wall, but, look, there was paint and so what if he was shaking a little and his fingers were sweaty, he was here and not hyperventilating and what more could—

“Ooh, Arthur, I meant to—” said Robert suddenly, and the platform shook, and Arthur dropped the stupid roller brush. 

Onto Robert. 

“Oh,” said Arthur and Robert. 

Eames burst out laughing. 

Robert tentatively ran a hand through his paint-smeared hair. 

“Your nose, too,” Eames informed him gleefully. 

“I’m sorry,” said Arthur. 

“You startled him,” Eames explained, peering over the railing. 

“Yeah…” said Robert, still dazed. “I’m gonna go… wash this, I guess.” 

“Take your time!” urged Eames. 

“Don’t worry about it, Arthur, it’s all good,” said Robert, summoning a smile, even though Arthur refused to be worried about it, because it wasn’t as if Robert had swallowed any, and, besides, it was half Robert’s fault. Maybe a quarter. But partially, for sure. 

“You,” Arthur said, turning back to Eames, “are mean.” 

“You’re the one who dropped the brush!” said Eames. “When you told me you could handle Robert yourself, I admit I wasn’t thinking of _that_.”

“It was an accident,” said Arthur huffily. 

“And he didn’t give you back the roller,” Eames observed. They both looked at the faraway stage floor, where Arthur’s roller sat abandoned, surrounded by a splattering of paint. 

“I’ll go down and hold the scaffold for you,” Arthur decided. 

“You know no one actually has to hold the scaffold, right?” 

“I’m going down,” said Arthur. “And staying down.” 

“You’re leaving me, pet?” 

Arthur sighed. It didn’t matter. Really, it didn’t. His ridiculous infatuation with Eames was exactly that—ridiculous, and a simple infatuation. Because collarbones and British accent and insanely good acting. Anyone would fall for Eames. 

And that was the issue, wasn’t it? _Anyone_ would fall for Eames, Eames could have anyone, and why in the world would that choice ever be Arthur, who was, as he had insisted before, exactly as Not Fun as his seventeen-year-old self? So it wouldn’t make a difference if he told Eames one more pathetic fear. 

“I don’t like heights,” said Arthur, because that was the simplest way to explain it. “And I’m going down, and not coming up. I’ll find you someone else to help.” 

“Oh,” said Eames. “Darling, why didn’t you say something before?” 

_Because I thought I could keep at least this to myself. Because Ariadne handed me a perfect three hours to spend just with you and I didn’t want to ruin that. As if it would_ matter, Arthur thought. 

Arthur shrugged and ducked beneath the railing, planting his feet securely on the next rung down. 

“On second thought, I definitely need someone to hold the scaffold,” said Eames. 

Arthur rolled his eyes. 

“I need someone to keep me company,” said Eames. “You can do it from the ground.”

“Ariadne will probably want me to do something else,” said Arthur as he reached the stage floor, safe at last. 

Although, come to think of it, never mind what Ariadne would say: Arthur needed to ensure that _Eames_ wouldn’t fall. 

“Nonsense,” said Eames. “Stay here, and when a section is ready to paint from your level, you can do that.” 

Arthur titled his head back to look at Eames. “Don’t drop anything on me.” 

“Never, darling,” said Eames.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm consistently surprised by how easy it is to lose sight of the big picture of your own fic until you post it. (That is: When did Robert become a character with more than two lines?)


	6. Chapter 6

“Everybody stop—where’s the cigarette case?” Dom shouted. 

Onstage, the actors froze. Mal continued to type notes on her laptop. 

“Arthur, where the fuck is the cigarette case? We can’t do the scene without the cigarette case,” Dom snapped. 

“Let me check,” said Arthur, slipping backstage. 

“We can’t stop rehearsal every two minutes because backstage is a mess and you aren’t making sure things are ready to go for their entrances,” Dom continued, his loud voice quite audible to Arthur behind the curtains. 

“Shut it, Dom,” Eames snapped. 

“Oh, so you know where the cigarette case is?” Dom retorted. 

Arthur knelt in the backstage detritus, shoving aside a box of fake flowers to dig beneath the prop table. 

“No, but last time I checked, Arthur wasn’t prop lead,” said Eames. 

“Well, where’s your friend Ariadne, then?” Dom asked. 

His voice was closer, now, so Arthur guessed he’d actually come on stage. 

“Out hunting for a new china set, because Robert broke two of the cups yesterday,” Eames replied, his voice cool. 

“Maybe she should have done that outside of rehearsal,” said Dom. “That way, the rest of us can get through what we need to, and she would be here to get direction from Mal.” 

“I’m sure she never considered that,” said Eames icily. “I’m sure there’s nothing she’d rather do than drive to every Goodwill in the tri-state area at ten o’clock by herself.” 

Arthur gave up on stage left: the cigarette case wasn’t there, and knocking over leftover two-by-fours wasn’t going to help. 

He crossed onstage.

“Well?” Dom asked, his arms folded. 

He and Eames stood facing each other, a tea table between them. 

“Checking the other side,” said Arthur, and exited stage right. 

“Lane?” Eames asked. “It seems likely that you were the last one to touch the cigarette case, given that it’s your bloody prop.” 

“I don’t remember,” the actor said. 

_Actors_ , Arthur thought despairingly. Backstage right was a mess. There was no way Ariadne had left it like this the night before. 

“You need to keep track of your props,” said Eames. “Ari’s got nine of us to handle. The table’s taped—all you have to do is put it back in its spot at the end of rehearsal. Then everybody’s happy.” 

“Sorry,” said Lane. “I just really don’t remember.” 

“It’s all right,” said Dom. “I know you’ve got a lot going on.” 

Arthur pulled a flashlight off the prop table and clicked it on. 

“No, it’s not fucking all right,” said Eames. “Everybody’s got to do their jobs, all the parts of their job. And part of his job is putting his props back.” 

“If Ariadne and Arthur were doing _their_ jobs—” Dom began. 

“Leave Arthur out of this, for fuck’s sake,” said Eames. “What even is your job, anyway? As far as I can tell, you don’t actually do anything on this production except make more work for everyone else. Namely Arthur.”

Arthur considered impaling himself with the backstage lamp. 

If he could just find the stupid cigarette case… 

“No, I think making work for Arthur has been _your_ job, for years now,” said Dom. 

“I’m still young enough to learn new tricks,” said Eames. “You, on the other hand…” 

“Maybe we could just run the scene without the cigarette case?” Robert squeaked. 

Arthur pushed aside a veritable mountain of discarded turn of the century hats. 

_Fucking finally_ , he thought, and tugged the slim cigarette case from the rubble. 

“We’ve waited this long already,” said Dom. “Arthur!” 

“Yes,” said Arthur, hurrying back on stage. He thrust the cigarette case in Lane’s hands. “Whichever one of you was fucking around with the hats, stop it. You’re making a mess for costume crew, creating a tripping hazard backstage, and making it impossible to find anything. If it’s not yours and you’re not using it in the specific scene you’re running, _do not touch_. Got it?” 

Arthur turned his glare over all the actors. Except for Eames, because Eames was right: he’d stopped messing around backstage. Or at least, he’d stopped messing around in ways that actually interfered with rehearsal.

“Control your fucking actors, Dom,” Eames said. “The crew is just fine without your input.” 

“Let’s take the scene from the top,” Mal called. 

Arthur rolled his eyes and hopped offstage. 

Mal either created the drama or ignored it completely—and this was Eames and Dom’s mess. And possibly Arthur’s. 

_Fuck_. He didn’t have time for theatre drama. No one aside from actors ever had time for theatre drama. 

He’d had to run backstage for two weeks by himself in tenth grade, when the co-stage managers had gotten into an enormous fight and thus spent every rehearsal in non-couples’ therapy, overseen by whichever actor wasn’t on stage, and, occasionally, the assistant costume crew head. 

It had been a less than pleasant experience. 

Arthur settled back into his seat, flipping back a few pages in the script. 

_Handbag belongs stage left_ , he wrote, as if he and Ariadne didn’t already know that. 

At the end of rehearsal, Eames made to head toward Arthur, but Arthur shook his head and walked over to Mal.

He and Eames had no need for an awkward conversation in which Arthur defended his best friend (well, second best friend) for yelling at him—in front of everyone—about something that was only partially his fault.

Arthur could handle Dom and navigating their strange, incomprehensible-to-outsiders relationship, just like he could handle Robert. Without Eames.

(Whether he could handle Eames, handle the warm, fluttery feeling that had risen in his chest as Eames had defended him, even though Arthur hadn’t _needed_ said defense—well, that was another issue entirely.)

 

Arthur was surprised to see Eames at their post-rehearsal breakfast the next day. Rehearsal had run long the night before (no surprises there), and Arthur knew Eames had a big paper due in his 11 o’clock class.

“Finish the paper all right?” Arthur asked as they settled into their usual table just beneath the stained glass window. 

“Hope so,” Eames replied, lifting his steaming cup. There were deep circles under his eyes, and even holding the cup seemed to tire him. 

Arthur frowned. “Will you be able to nap before rehearsal?” 

“I’ve got class, then a shift…” Eames began to tick his schedule off on his fingers. “Pre-rehearsal dinner, since it’s not Ian’s night, is it?” 

Ian was Arthur’s roommate from sophomore year, the result of his attempts to talk to people other than Mal and Dom. They got a meal together once or twice a week. It was nice to have somebody to talk baseball with, somebody you could complain to about your awful gen ed professors. Somebody uncomplicated. 

Most lunches were still reserved for Mal, but they weren’t pre- or post-rehearsal meals, mostly because Arthur had put a ban on theatre talk during their few non-theatre hours. He’d wanted to put a ban on Dom talk, too—and really, he was friends with Dom, but he didn’t need to hear one of his best friends talk about what it was like to be _with_ his other best friend—but Mal had pouted and wheedled ( _en français, bien sûr_ ) and Arthur had given in. 

“No, he eats with his lab group on Wednesdays,” said Arthur. “But you should nap after your shift. I’ll bring you dinner, you can eat it on the way to rehearsal.” 

“You’d do that, darling?” 

“Sure,” said Arthur. “You need sleep and food, or you’ll be cranky at rehearsal. This way, everybody’s happy.”

“Oh, I see how it is,” Eames teased. “Stop by the Student Union this afternoon and I’ll give you my card, yeah?” 

 

Arthur picked up dinner from one of the out-of-the-way dining halls. They were serving Eames’s favorite, after all, and Arthur thought Eames deserved a reward. 

And, of course, this would soften him up before rehearsal and make him more inclined to be cooperative. 

Anything to make Mal happy. 

 

“I’ve re-evaluated. This is the best day,” Eames declared, as Arthur met him outside of his dorm and passed him the heaping to-go box. 

“Er, why?” 

“Guess who’s now living by himself?” 

“You?” 

“Yup,” said Eames, nearly skipping with glee. “Ethan dropped out. Or was kicked out. Or some combination. I don’t know, it sounds like he was on some sort of probation and then something else happened. Cheating or harassment or both, who knows. They weren’t too keen on giving me the details, but the main point is that I am _free_. I mean, it took until April, but—freedom.” 

“Congratulations,” said Arthur. “I’d send a card, but I know you never check your mailbox.” 

“I’ll try to contain my disappointment,” said Eames, grinning. 

 

Eames was texting backstage. 

Arthur finished adjusting the glow-tape for one of the sight lines and (quietly) stomped over—which, given the tininess of the backstage area, meant all of two short steps. 

“No phones,” Arthur hissed. 

“But, darling, I’m texting Ari,” said Eames, although he quickly stowed the phone in his pocket. 

“If you need to speak to Ari, she’s on headset,” said Arthur. “Just tell me what you need.” 

“Sweetheart, I thought you’d never ask,” said Eames, and although it was dark backstage, Arthur could swear he caught a wink. 

“That’s your cue,” said Arthur, as Lane announced Jack (“Mr. Ernest Worthing”), and pushed Eames onstage. Arthur retreated as far away from the curtain as he could get, then pressed the button on his headset pack. “Arthur to Ariadne.” 

As headsets in college theatre were quite limited, prop crew heads often went without. But because this was a Mal-and-Dom production, Arthur had insisted Ariadne be on headset and that she mainly be stationed on Nash’s side of the stage, so that she could keep an eye on both him and the actors. 

“Ariadne here,” came the reply. 

“Why is Eames texting you?” 

“Darling Arthur, were you aware of the precise cut of your trousers when you dressed this morning?” said Ariadne, her voice breathier than usual. 

Arthur rolled his eyes (yes, even though no one was there to witness said eye-rolling). 

“Seriously, Ariadne,” he said. 

There was a beat of silence. 

“Fine, don’t tell me, keep your Eamesian secrets. But no more texting, okay? Don’t encourage him. If he needs a prop, he goes through me, understood?” 

“Got it,” said Ariadne, snickering for some reason. 

“Thanks. Over,” said Arthur. 

 

“They should serve wine here,” Mal complained as she and Arthur made their way to a table—any table, because it was just after twelve, the dining hall was crowded with the post-11 a.m. class rush, and anyone who claimed to have a regular lunch table was deluding themselves. If you were very lucky, you had a regular _side_ of the eating area. 

“I apologize that you did not bother to apply to a French university,” Arthur said, slipping into a seat and automatically tilting it back so it rested on just two legs. He could condition himself out of his falling phobia, damn it. “And if they did serve wine here, it would be awful and you wouldn’t drink it anyway.” 

Mal glared and flipped back her hair. “Why must you always be so practical?” 

“Also, you have good wine in your room,” Arthur pointed out. 

“I do,” Mal conceded, a coquettish smile flitting across her lips. “Dom and I have plans for that wine, after rehearsal.” 

“Ugh,” said Arthur, setting down his fork and letting the front chair legs slam against the ground. “No. Please, God, no more talk of whatever it is you and Dom get up to, I don’t want to—”

“Sex, Arthur,” said Mal. “We get up to sex.” 

“Yes, thank you, I got that,” said Arthur. 

“You know, you might be more comfortable discussing this if you and Eames would—”

“Nope,” Arthur interrupted. “We are absolutely not discussing Eames.”

“Not even a little?” Mal pouted. 

“Not even the most little,” said Arthur, even though he wasn’t sure that made sense. 

Mal sighed. 

 

They were rehearsing a non-Eames scene, and Arthur had to admit that he paid slightly less attention to those than ones with Eames in them. Or at least, a different kind of attention. Under the blue light of the backstage lamp, Arthur flipped through his notebook, looking for his to-do list. Only a week and a half until opening night. How had that happened? 

“Nash to Arthur,” Nash said over the headsets. 

Arthur sighed and reached down to his headset pack. Ariadne was out tonight, consulting with Yusuf about something, which meant dealing with Nash was all on Arthur. “Arthur here.” 

There was silence for a moment. 

Then Eames’s voice, crackling slightly: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” 

“Eames, give the headset back,” Arthur said at once, but since he was the only one on his side of the stage, he permitted himself to grin helplessly down at his script. 

“Thou art more lovely and more temperate,” Eames continued. 

“Eames…” 

“Rough winds do shake the _darling_ buds of May,” Eames insisted, so Arthur sat down on the floor, rested his head against the leg of the prop table, and let Eames finish. 

_Eames should do all Shakespeare, all the time_ , Arthur thought drowsily. Eames’s voice was made for Shakespeare, just the right level of playfulness that never lost the capacity for solemnity. 

“Thanks, Eames,” Arthur whispered. 

A few beats of silence passed. 

“Sorry, Arthur,” said Nash. 

“It’s… fine,” Arthur made himself say, even though it wasn’t fine, and if it had been anything other than Eames and _Sonnet 18_ , he would have stormed over to the other side of the stage to put an end to such disruptive shenanigans. “Don’t let him steal it during the show, all right? The headsets aren’t toys.” 

“He bribed me,” said Nash, rather unapologetically for someone admitting to having been successfully bribed. 

“With what?” 

“A cupcake from Du Nord,” said Nash, referring to the campus’s most popular café. 

“Don’t get crumbs anywhere _near_ the props,” Arthur commanded. “And give the headset back to Eames for a second. Wait, don’t, that’s his cue—”

Sure enough, Eames’s voice—his Jack voice, that was, not the one in which he read Arthur sonnets from across the stage on stolen headsets—cut through the curtains blocking Arthur’s view of the stage.

At the end of the night, Eames waited for Arthur, fiddling with his phone near the doors while Arthur went over notes with Dom and Mal. (Arthur sent Nash home, because Nash’s presence at these meetings just slowed everything down, and by the end of rehearsal Arthur was too tired for hand-holding.)

Arthur wished that Eames had to stay late, so that Arthur could wait for _him_. 

“Nash got a cupcake,” Arthur complained as soon as he reached the entryway. 

“You got a sonnet,” Eames replied, his voice light as he opened the door and ushered Arthur through.

“Memorized?” Arthur asked suspiciously. 

“What kind of hack do you take me for?” Eames asked. “Of course memorized, darling.” 

“I noticed that, by the way,” said Arthur. 

“Hmm?” 

“The _darling_.” 

“Yes, Shakespeare did some bits right,” said Eames. 

“Only some?”

“Only some,” Eames replied, his voice firm. 

 

The cast was arguing about something stupid—Eames’s fault, of course, and it had been going on for _five minutes_ and they did not have time for this because Arthur did not write _let Eames argue about ridiculous matters of sofa patterns and posh vowels_ into the rehearsal schedule, and then Dom had to jump in, which just made everything worse. Arthur and Eames could argue, because they—well, they got along now, didn’t they? And Arthur and Dom could argue, because they were friends, and Mal and Arthur could argue because they were basically platonic soulmates. 

But Dom and Eames didn’t really like each other, which meant that their arguments were real arguments, too real, ones that skipped over actual business matters and straight for the personal. 

Robert sat, looking uncomfortable, on the set sofa. 

“Um, Arthur?” Nash whispered over the headset. “Um?” 

“On it,” Arthur replied wearily. 

Arthur stepped out from backstage. 

“Stop it,” he said, crossing straight to Eames, although he looked at Dom, who was glaring from the second row. 

“No, have you been listening to this? He—” Dom protested, but Arthur shook his head.

“Just stop,” he said. He turned to Eames. “This is a breakfast matter, okay? We’ll deal with this at breakfast.” He looked out at Mal, who was smiling fondly, as if she liked nothing better than Arthur having to storm onstage in the middle of rehearsal to end a ridiculous fight. 

“Let’s take it from the top of the scene, all right?” Mal called, clapping her hands. 

Arthur returned to his spot behind the curtain. 

“Um, Arthur?” Nash again. 

“Is there a problem?” Arthur asked. 

“Breakfast?” 

“What?” asked Arthur. 

“Er, you and Eames?” 

“We have a post-rehearsal breakfast,” said Arthur. What was so difficult to understand about that? 

“That’s so cute,” said a voice, a real, embodied voice, beside him. Arthur turned to find one of Mal’s costume crew underlings switching out a hat. 

“Sorry, what?” Arthur said to her. 

“That you and Eames have a post-rehearsal breakfast,” she said. “You’re so cute together.” 

“But…” Arthur began. “We’re not together.” 

“Oh,” she said. 

Over the headset, Nash said, “I think that’s a good strategy.” 

“Eames does, too,” said Ariadne, which surprised Arthur, because Ariadne almost never joined in on other people’s headset conversations. 

“You should be,” said the costume crew minion. “God, you’d win ‘hottest theatre department couple’ hands _down_. Even Mal would vote for you.”

Arthur frowned. “She’s won the last two years. And I’m not a theatre student.” 

“Well, you’re always working on one show or other, so I’m sure they’d make an exception for you and Eames,” she shrugged.

“There is no me and Eames,” Arthur said. 

“Sure,” she said. “Mal and Dom don’t do post-rehearsal breakfast.” 

_That’s because Mal and Dom do post-rehearsal other activities_ , Arthur thought, _and then neither of them is awake for breakfast_. 

“It’s a good strategy,” said Arthur, both to the other techie and into the headset, and firmly looked down at his script. If he had reached a point in the conversation where he was quoting _Nash_ , it was definitely time for one of them to exit. 

“Well, I’ve got what I needed,” she said, waving the other hat. “See you around.” 

On the other side of the curtain, Mal called for a five-minute water break. 

“Who was that?” Robert asked, ambling offstage. 

“One of Mal’s assistants on costume crew,” said Arthur. 

“Costume crews always love me,” said Robert. “They always take my advice.”

Arthur failed at suppressing a cough—mostly because, two rehearsals prior, Robert had brought in his own books and tea service to use as props, and Ariadne had promptly pronounced them completely unfit for the production. (“We’re doing this as 1895, remember? So, no.”)

A scowl flashed across Robert’s face.

“I’m not sure how I feel about Ariadne,” Robert said, leaning against the prop table and consequently shifting a few of the fake-glass pieces out of position. “I know _Eames_ swears by her, but is that really a standard you can trust?” 

“What?” said Arthur. He was still feeling off-kilter from the cross-examination of his breakfast habits.

“I just don’t know if she was the right choice for prop crew head,” Robert continued. “She’s a little young, isn’t she?”

“She’s in your year,” Arthur said flatly. 

“She doesn’t seem all that reliable.”

_You only just got reliably off-book_ , Arthur thought, but he smiled tightly. “I think she’s fantastic,” he said. 

“And isn’t it kind of presumptuous of her to ask for a headset?” Robert’s voice rose. 

“Not really,” said Arthur, his tone cold. “We offered her one. It can be very useful for the rest of us to have Ariadne on headset.” 

“Oh,” said Robert.

“Is there a problem?” Eames asked, slipping behind the curtain. 

Arthur was starting to feel a bit crowded. 

“Not at all,” said Arthur. “We were just discussing what a great addition Ariadne is.” 

Eames flashed him a smile and moved a bit closer, shifting so that their shoulders were brushing, until they were both facing Robert. 

“She is, isn’t she?” Eames said. “You should tell her that, darling.” 

Arthur pressed the talk button on his headset. “Ariadne, you’re a fantastic addition to tech crew.” 

A pause. 

“Um, thank you?” came the reply, then: “Did Eames tell you to say that?” 

“Not exactly,” said Arthur, and winked at Eames, just because he could. “Any messages for Eames while we’re at it?” 

“Tell him I like 29 for his next,” Ariadne said. 

“Got it,” said Arthur. “Eames, Ariadne says she likes 29 for your next. I assume you know what that means?” 

“I do,” said Eames. 

“That’s five!” Mal called from the audience. 

“Send out any actors you’ve got with you,” Arthur said into the headset. “Off with you,” he said to Robert and Eames. 

And if Eames was the one he pushed away, and if he thought of his hand pressing against Eames’s shoulder for the rest of the night—well, no one else had to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Truly, I was going to give you all a different poet, but Shakespeare just makes it too easy. Who I am to argue with a Shakespearean ‘darling’? That said, in case it is not abundantly clear, I wrote the last scene of my coffee shop AU and realized, “Wait. I did this all wrong. Arthur should be the stage manager.”


	7. Chapter 7

Dress rehearsals started. 

There was a tiny greenroom that functioned as a dressing room, meeting space, and general actors’ lounge all at once behind the stage, and Nash and Dom had cleared out its storage closet so the more squeamish actresses could change there. 

“Ten minutes, everybody,” Arthur called, walking into the greenroom and analyzing the actors’ progress. 

“Thank you, ten minutes!” the actresses called from the storage closet. 

Arthur stopped to examine the rehearsal sign-in sheet (for actors and techies), then continued through the room. 

Robert was tying his shoes; Eames was… oh. 

Eames had tugged off his t-shirt and had evidently become too caught up in his conversation with the butler to put his costume shirt on. 

Arthur swallowed and looked away. He was in the greenroom for legitimate stage manager purposes, to make announcements and hurry everyone along and definitely not to ogle Eames’s muscles, his bare shoulders and infinitely kissable collarbones ( _what, no, that kind of thinking is not allowed, not even a little bit_ ) and, fuck, his tattoos—

“Let’s try to start on time tonight, okay?” Arthur said loudly, not looking at Eames, and exited before anybody could ask why he was suddenly so flushed. 

Arthur slipped backstage and turned on his blue light.

“Headset check,” he said. 

“Ariadne here,” Ariadne said at once. 

“Nash here,” said Nash a moment later, no doubt at Ariadne’s prompting. 

Arthur waited another beat. 

“Dom, headset check,” he said, pushing the talk button with one hand and flipping his script open with the other. 

And, huh. 

There was a set of bright green Post-Its on the first page of Act I. 

_Darling —_

_When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes_

_I all alone beweep my outcast state…_

The notes weren’t signed, but Arthur would recognize Eames’s cramped handwriting anywhere. 

With trembling fingers, Arthur pressed the talk button once more.

“Arthur to Ariadne,” he said. 

“Ariadne here.” 

“29,” said Arthur. “You meant— _Sonnet 29_.” 

“Yes,” said Ariadne, her voice even. 

“‘I scorn to change my state with kings,’” Arthur quoted. 

“Indeed.” 

“Actors aren’t allowed backstage without supervision,” said Arthur.

“Who said he was unsupervised?” replied Ariadne, as Arthur had half-feared, half-hoped. 

“Oh,” said Arthur. “Thanks.”

“You’re very welcome,” said Ariadne. Arthur suspected she was laughing at him. 

“I’m going to call five minutes,” said Arthur. 

“You do that,” said Ariadne, and, yes, Arthur definitely heard a giggle. A completely uncalled for, irrational giggle. 

Arthur stomped to the greenroom door and pushed it open. 

“Five minutes!” he shouted.

“Thank you, five minutes,” the actresses replied in chorus from the makeup table. 

“Your efforts to keep us punctual are much appreciated, as ever, darling,” Eames said as he combed his hair back. 

“Um,” said Arthur. “Your efforts to—Shakespeare-ify my script are also appreciated.” 

Eames winked. 

“What?” said Robert, who was fussing with his waistcoat. 

“Eames made a very helpful addition to my notes,” Arthur said, not looking at Eames. 

“You mean he vandalized your script and you’re covering for him,” Robert replied flatly. 

“No,” said Arthur. “I mean, it was—” He cut himself off.

Because the sonnet was. Well, it was a very _Eamesian_ gesture, and people did not tend to correctly interpret Eamesian gestures. 

The sonnet was—cute. And lovely. And adorable. 

But that was just Arthur being an idiot, just Arthur being… something… Just Arthur, being ridiculous. 

Because it was just Eames, just something Eames would do, no big deal, just how they _worked_ , and they worked well together now, and wasn’t it nice? 

It didn’t mean anything, not for real life, the life that existed outside the theatre, the life Arthur would return to full-time as soon as the performances were over. Arthur wanted Eames in real life, wanted Eames to want him in real life, not just backstage. Backstage didn’t count. (He’d had his first three kisses backstage, and every one of those boys had disappeared after the curtain fell.)

“It was…?” Robert prompted. 

“It was very nice,” said Arthur staunchly. “And much appreciated.” 

“Oh, sweetheart, I never knew you cared,” Eames said, his voice light. 

“Three minutes,” said Arthur, and fled backstage. 

 

Arthur hadn’t realized before just how many exits Eames had, just how much time he spent offstage. 

He swore Eames hadn’t always had this many exits. Wasn’t his next entrance from Ariadne’s side, anyway? 

But in the weird logic of play time, somehow, Eames was almost _always_ backstage, whispering the other actors’ lines in Arthur’s ear, making shadow puppets on the wall, reaching over Arthur to turn the page in his script. 

And was it smaller back here than it had been before? Because whenever Eames was backstage with him, he was _touching_ him, brushing against him as he passed toward the curtain or into the greenroom, slipping an arm around him to grab a prop, his hand grazing Arthur’s back as he maneuvered through the dark. 

It was maddening, and intoxicating, and Arthur would spend the entirety of Eames’s next scene regulating his heartbeat. 

_It’s just a play thing_ , he told himself. _It’s crowded back here, and—and heightened emotions, and adrenaline, and nerves, it’s just one of those theatre things that disappears after opening night, maybe at the end of the cast party, if you’re lucky._

He wasn’t fifteen or seventeen anymore, and a six-week flirtation, always surrounded by other cast members, wasn’t what he wanted. Wasn’t enough. Not with Eames.

 

As Arthur rolled himself out of bed the next morning, he was reminded of how much he hated tech week. 

Tech week rehearsals went until two in the fucking morning and Arthur had morning classes _every day but Friday_ and he had a research paper due Thursday and everything was awful. 

Arthur fumbled for his glasses—no way was he dealing with his contacts today—ran a hand through his hair, and shoved his shoes on. He was awake, and that was about all anybody could expect from him. 

Anybody being Eames, because their breakfasts were still on. 

(“We’re still doing breakfast this week, right, pet? Because if we don’t, I’ll never get out of bed, and Professor Miles will kill me if I miss class for theatre again.”)

Eames was slumped against a low wall outside of Arthur’s dorm, eyes closed, bag at his feet, when Arthur walked up. 

“Is that an Arthur I hear?” Eames asked, tilting his head back. 

“Perhaps,” said Arthur. 

Eames opened his eyes and beamed, reaching out to push Arthur’s glasses a little farther back on his nose. “I love tech week!” 

Arthur contemplated rolling his eyes, then decided he was too tired. “I’m rolling my eyes at you,” he said instead. 

“Your eyes, which are behind your glasses,” Eames declared gleefully. 

“Yes, nicely done, now let’s go,” Arthur said, grabbing Eames’s bag. “Coffee awaits.” 

 

Arthur, Eames, and Ariadne were having an emergency meeting in the greenroom while everyone else was on break. Or, to be slightly more accurate, they were having a pretend emergency meeting so they could get out of whatever absurd bonding run Dom was currently leading across campus. 

Arthur wasn’t really paying attention to the conversation, just balancing in his tipped-back chair as per usual and flipping through his notebook, finalizing the pre-show checklist he needed to give to Nash and the other techies. 

Without warning, Eames kicked one of the front legs, sending Arthur’s legs flying and his vestibular system into High Fucking Alert. 

As the front chair legs slammed into the ground, Arthur turned his head to glare at Eames.

“Really?” 

Eames shrugged. “Just demonstrating something to Ari.” 

“Well, don’t,” Arthur snapped. 

Eames’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry, darling, I didn’t—”

“Why would you kick the chair of someone who believes scaffolds need steadying?” Arthur demanded.

“You said _heights_!” 

“I _meant_ free fall. I would be kick-ass in space.” 

“Arthur verses zero gravity?” Eames suggested, smiling gently. 

Arthur’s heartbeat steadied. “I’d win.”

“You would.” 

“I should have gone on the stupid run,” Ariadne moaned.

 

Tech week was almost over: only two more rehearsals left.

Two more rehearsals left, and then the entire theatre department and everyone’s friends and friends-of-friends and maybe a high school class from town would arrive and expect something at least approaching brilliance—

“Arthur to Ariadne,” Arthur hissed. 

“Ariadne here.” 

“Is Eames getting sick?” Arthur demanded. 

“What?”

“He sneezed.” 

“When?”

“Tonight,” said Arthur. “During pre-rehearsal dinner.” 

“So, once, four hours ago?” 

“I just thought of it now,” said Arthur, which was _stupid_ , because that meant he had wasted a whole four hours of _prevent Eames from becoming deathly ill right before opening night_ time. 

“I think he’s fine. His voice sounds fine, doesn’t it?” Ariadne asked. 

There was a lull in their conversation as Arthur listened intently. 

“I think so?” Arthur guessed.

“He sounds fine,” said Ariadne. “People sneeze sometimes.” 

“Well, yes,” Arthur allowed, “but colds _develop_ , you know, over time, and what if this is our warning sign and we’re not taking it seriously?” 

“Make him tea with honey after rehearsal,” Ariadne suggested. 

“I don’t have tea,” said Arthur.

“Eames does,” said Ariadne, which was just rude, because Arthur didn’t have time to sleep, much less follow Eames back to his room and make him tea. (He’d have to settle for ensuring Eames drank his with honey the next morning.) 

“Standby for fifteen,” Dom interrupted. 

Right. Because lighting cues were a thing, because this was a dress rehearsal. 

“Fifteen, go,” said Dom. “We’ve got a bit until sixteen, so, carry on.” 

Arthur felt his face grow warm. 

“Thank you, Ariadne,” he said. 

“Any time,” she replied, her voice cheerful. 

Rehearsal dragged on. 

Arthur took to pacing backstage, flipping a pencil in his hands. 

He had a paper due in two days, a big paper, an important paper (fuck professors who assigned end-of-April papers _and_ finals), and he wasn’t writing it because he was listening to Eames have the same conversations over and over again… 

Arthur turned a page in the script, breathed in, breathed out. 

Okay. This was all okay. It would all get done. It would all be fine. 

_Quoique les artistes européens aient peint des scènes de l’Orient avant le dix-neuvième siècle, il est notamment après l’expédition de Napoléon…_

Yes, that was a start, wasn’t it? 

He could just… he could just write the introduction in his head while they finished up Act I, and during Acts II and III he could work through a couple of the body paragraphs. 

Arthur continued to pace. 

Fucking Delacroix, fucking Browne, fucking Nerval. Fucking French Orientalism. 

Fuck, fuck, fuck, this was never going to get done, he’d never write this paper, he’d never sleep, he had to sleep, he couldn’t fall asleep during the show, but he had to write this paper, it was worth a full third of his grade, fuck Mal for dropping French this semester… 

Eames’s scene must have ended at last, because Arthur sensed a warm presence hovering just behind, and Eames was whispering “How’d I do, darling?” into his headset-free ear. 

Before Arthur could reply, Eames’s hands were on his shoulders, his fingers rubbing slow circles into his back, pushing just hard enough that Arthur had to put a hand on the wall, except Eames wasn’t even pressing that hard at all, a perfect amount of pressure really, but Arthur felt unstable nonetheless and the wall was solid beneath his palm, and the hands were moving, angling for just _that_ spot between his shoulder blades—

“Shh, just relax, sweetheart,” Eames murmured. 

“Standby for nineteen,” Dom called in his other ear. 

Arthur turned his headset off. 

It was stupid and irresponsible of him, but they could last just one minute without him, couldn’t they? He could steal this one minute just for himself, for him and Eames. 

Eames’s fingers drifted lower, just a little. 

Arthur whimpered, maybe. Just a little.

“This okay?” Eames’s voice, so low. 

_God, yes_ , Arthur thought, _let’s skip the play altogether and tell my French professor to stick his paper on Orientalism where it belongs and we can just…_

“Yes.” A whisper. 

Eames’s hands continued to press against the knots of tension in Arthur’s back, and then Arthur really did need the wall, because he was melting and he’d never been this relaxed in his entire _life_. 

They didn’t talk. 

They just stood there, in the near darkness, Eames’s hands in constant, soothing motion, the only sounds their breathing and the soft rasp of Eames’s fingers against Arthur’s t-shirt. Whatever was happening onstage was distant, a different world, an alternate layer of a separate life. 

And then Eames’s hands fell away. 

“That’s my cue,” he said. 

Arthur closed his eyes and nodded. 

He turned around just as Eames stepped onstage, then turned his headset back on.


	8. Chapter 8

“My loves,” Mal began, her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes alight with the slightly manic glee of someone living off of espresso and little else. “We have arrived at our final rehearsal. I do not want to you _play_ your characters tonight: I want you to live them, to be them.” 

“I am, in fact, Ernest,” Eames whispered in Arthur’s ear. 

Arthur turned his head. “You’re Eames.” 

“I’m following Mal’s instructions,” Eames replied, so close that his nose brushed a curl that Arthur hadn’t bothered to tame. 

“Excuse me,” Robert interrupted, glaring at them. “You might need to repeat that last bit, Mal. _Certain people_ were not paying attention.” 

Mal’s gaze flittered over them, supremely unconcerned. 

“Just getting into character,” Eames said, bouncing on his toes and sending a predatory grin across the circle toward Robert. 

“I am sure that Jack does not say whatever you were whispering to Arthur,” Robert said flatly. 

“Arthur did help me memorize my lines,” Eames said, his eyes wide and innocent. “Sometimes I need a refresher.” 

Arthur coughed to hide his snort. 

“Sometimes, Robert,” Eames continued, “it’s the spirit, not the letter, of the character that matters.” 

“Please remember that you are close friends,” Mal said. 

“Actually,” said Eames, “Jack and Algernon are brothers.” 

“In the end,” snapped Robert. 

“We should start now if we want to finish before three,” Dom said. 

“Thank you,” said Arthur. This was possibly the most helpful thing Dom had said (regarding the production, that was) the entire semester. 

“The play I was in last semester rehearsed until dawn,” Robert sniffed. 

Arthur folded his arms. “Your crew didn’t schedule it out properly. If you do it right, everyone gets sleep.” 

“I don’t think you understand the _real_ artistic spirit,” said Robert. “It was _MacBeth_ —”

Shrieks from the majority of the cast drowned out the rest of the sentence. 

Mal stalked over to Robert. “Excuse me?” 

“Does it count, if it was just in the greenroom?” asked Gwendolen worriedly. “I’m never sure on that point.” 

“What?” Robert said. 

“Are you _trying_ to sabotage us?” Miss Prism demanded. 

“One does not name the Scottish Play in a theatre,” Eames said. 

“Oh, for—seriously?” Robert said. 

“Seriously,” said Arthur. 

“You need to do the thing,” said Lane. 

“The…?” said Robert. 

“We do not have time for this,” said Dom. (Arthur was very close to laughing.) 

“I do not have time for my production to be _ruined_ ,” said Mal. “Who can teach Robert the thing?” 

“I can,” Eames volunteered. 

“Do it,” she commanded, then turned on her heel and walked out of the greenroom. 

“Let’s go,” said Eames.

“I’ll come,” said Arthur, worried about sending the two of them—the two _leads_ —off on their own. “Dom, Nash, somebody—lead a warm-up.” 

They were silent until they reached the lobby. 

“Right,” said Eames. “You need to turn three times, spit over your left shoulder, swear, and then say ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us.’ Then Arthur will invite you back in.” 

“Can you repeat that?” Robert asked.

Eames looked plaintively at Arthur. 

Arthur shrugged and pulled open the theatre’s main door. “I’ll be inside. Knock when you’re done.” 

From behind the closed door, he heard Eames repeat the instructions. A moment later, Eames said, “ _Left_ shoulder, left.” About a minute after that, he and Robert shouted “FUCK,” and two minutes after that (apparently seven words from _Hamlet_ were too much for a star of a play to memorize under pressure), a knock sounded on the door. 

“You may come in,” Arthur said, and opened the door. 

Robert was red-faced, but evidently he hadn’t lost all of his former goodwill toward Arthur, as he muttered, “Thanks,” as he passed into the theatre. 

“Okay, back to the greenroom,” said Arthur, marching down the aisle. 

Inside the greenroom, Ariadne was leading the cast and crew in basic yoga poses. 

“Breathe with me!” she instructed. 

“Arthur!” Dom shouted, in evident relief. 

“We’re back, the production is saved,” Eames announced. 

Robert _hmph_ ed. 

“Places!” Arthur called. 

“Thank you, places!” replied everyone but Eames, who winked. 

Arthur slipped backstage, nerves thrumming. 

 

The final dress rehearsal was not flawless, but that was acceptable, expected, even slightly welcomed, because it was a truth universally acknowledged that whatever went wrong during final dress would be executed perfectly on opening night. (Everything else was a toss-up.)

Arthur bid goodnight to Dom and Mal, then ducked into the greenroom, doing one last check for stray cell phones and student ID cards and anything someone might actually need before the next day’s call time. 

When he returned backstage, he noticed Eames leaning on one of the living room set chairs, humming. 

Arthur crossed toward him, not speaking. 

It was just past two a.m., and Arthur thought he’d like to lie down on the couch and fall asleep to the sound of—

“A little melodramatic, don’t you think?” Arthur murmured. 

Eames pointed at the set chairs. “Empty chairs.” He pointed at the coffee table. “Empty table.” 

“But we’ll all be here tomorrow,” said Arthur. “And don’t tell me you played Marius.” 

“Oh, darling,” laughed Eames. “You know me so well.” 

“So who was it?” Arthur pressed.

“Grantaire.” Eames flopped onto the sofa and patted it in invitation; Arthur obeyed, setting his backpack on the ground and slumping next to Eames. Maybe their thighs were touching. It was a small sofa. 

“I don’t recognize that name,” said Arthur. “Which one was he?” 

“The drunk,” said Eames. “Probably in love with Enjolras. _[Permets-tu](http://consultingreaders.tumblr.com/post/120739754696/long-live-the-republic-im-one-of-them)_ and all that.” 

“Oh,” said Arthur. 

It felt very late—very early—to be having a conversation about the unrequited love of dead French revolutionaries. 

“Is opening night the revolution?” Arthur asked, letting his head fall onto Eames’s shoulder. He was really very tired. 

“If you’d like, darling,” said Eames. 

“Mm,” said Arthur. “Maybe. Wait. The show… must go on. So. Can we put the revolution on hold, until after the final show? Mal needs to graduate.” 

“That can probably be arranged,” said Eames. “A few more days, then.” 

“A few more days,” Arthur agreed.


	9. Chapter 9

The whole cast and crew got together for an early dinner before call. 

Everyone was talking over everyone else, loudly and dramatically and with lots of hand gestures. People kept switching seats so they could talk over different people, and cups kept being knocked over in futile efforts to keep people with their food. 

Arthur was reminded of why he hated theatre people. 

“I like our dinners better,” Arthur moaned to Eames, who was sitting next to him and was the only other person who hadn’t switched seats. 

“I know, love,” said Eames, snagging a cooked carrot off of Arthur’s plate. “But it’s nice to get energized before a performance, and you know we’re all incurable extroverts.” 

Eames, it was true, had been enthusiastically engaging in half a dozen conversations at once throughout the dinner, despite his refusal to leave Arthur’s side. 

“It’s awful,” Arthur complained, and stole a piece of cantaloupe in revenge. 

Across from them, Mal clanged a spoon against her plastic cup. It was not, Arthur noted, particularly effective. 

“If you two could stop flirting, I’d like to make a brief speech,” Mal said. 

Arthur glared. 

_That is a gross violation of our gag rule regarding Eames_ , he thought at her. 

“Oh, just continue,” said Ariadne. “They never stop.” 

“Ari!” Eames said, to Arthur’s surprise. 

Ariadne ignored Eames, keeping her eyes fixed on Mal. 

“I’d like to thank you all for joining me on this journey,” said Mal. “As woefully dull as the standard reading is, this has been a lovely experience, and I have enjoyed working with each and every one of you.” 

“Only Mal would find the standard ‘woefully dull,’” Arthur whispered to Eames. 

“You are delightfully loyal to Wilde,” Eames replied.

Ariadne coughed. 

“We’re leaving now,” Mal said pointedly. 

“To the theatre!” Robert cried. 

Arthur rolled his eyes. 

“C’mon,” said Eames, standing up and tugging on the back of Arthur’s chair, even though Arthur was still sitting in it. “To the barricades.” 

 

“Ready in the booth?” Arthur asked into his headset. 

“Ready,” Dom confirmed. 

“Okay,” said Arthur, taking a deep breath. “Everybody, we’re doing shake out now!” 

The actors and backstage crew arranged themselves in a circle. 

“Everybody ready?” said Arthur, one hand on his handset. The person leading shake out couldn’t fully participate, but Arthur preferred it this way. 

“Always,” said Eames, looking at him expectantly. 

“Okay,” said Arthur again. “It goes right hand, left hand, right foot, left foot. And, one, two, three, four, five…” 

He counted quickly to ten, then switched from awkwardly bobbing while holding down the talk button to shaking out his left hand, then let his arm dangle limply as he rolled out his feet, first the right, then the left.

Then everything all over again, except only to nine. 

Eight. 

Seven.

Six… 

By the time they reached chaos of “One, one, one, one!” Eames was laughing at him. 

Arthur stuck his tongue out at him (what, the show was starting in five minutes, he was riding the adrenaline high from shake out, Eames had left him sonnets in his script) and called places. 

“Thank you, places!” 

Before Arthur could make more than two steps toward backstage, Eames caught up with him, placing a hand on his arm. 

“Hey,” said Eames. 

“Hi,” said Arthur. They’d been in and out of the same room for the past hour and a half, plus dinner before that, _plus_ an intense two-hour study session before that, because Arthur was determined not to fall behind on his work and Eames needed social control to ensure he actually did his reading instead of just doodling in the margins. 

“Thank you,” said Eames. 

“For what?” 

“Being the best,” said Eames. 

“Dimming house lights,” Dom said through the headset. 

“And giving me a second chance—okay, a fifth chance—this time,” Eames continued. “We didn’t used to… I didn’t really…” 

Arthur thought that the most awkward part about college was the whole _having to make friends all over again_ aspect, and also how you ended up _acquainted_ with a lot of people, but there was always that question of where the line was between acquaintances and actual friendship and no one ever talked about it, no one posted rules on your graduating class’s Facebook page and said, “Here’s how it goes. As soon as you start referring to their siblings by name and not just by “your sister/brother,” you’re actual friends, congratulations.” 

“It’s been really nice,” said Arthur. “Getting along.” 

“Yes,” said Eames, looking a bit relieved but also a bit lost. “We should, um, we should keep getting along? After.” 

Before Arthur could reply, Ariadne’s voice came through the headset: “Ariadne to Arthur?” 

“Arthur here.” 

“Eames is supposed to be backstage. My side of backstage,” said Ariadne. 

“What makes you think I know anything about Eames’s whereabouts?” Arthur asked, grinning at Eames. Just because he could—and because it was the best way he knew how to answer Eames. 

“Break a leg, darling,” Eames said, and walked away, throwing one last wink over his shoulder as he disappeared into the wings. 

“He should be there now,” said Arthur into the headset. 

“Thanks!” said Ariadne. “You’re the best.”

“That’s Eames’s line,” whispered Arthur as he settled into his own backstage area. 

“I’m aware,” said Ariadne dryly. 

And then Cobb was calling the cue for the house lights to go out, and then the lights were coming up on stage, and Act I began. 

 

Intermission was a crazy mess because the lighting board was acting up and Lane’s trousers had ripped along an… unfortunate seam after an over-enthusiastic exit (of course). At least he’d brought his own needle and thread so he hadn’t needed to wait for costume crew to begin repairs. 

Arthur was thankful that intermissions existed and also cursed them, because intermission was Exhibit A of the ‘work expands to fill the time you have’ principle. 

All of this meant that he didn’t actually see Eames at all until Arthur stood in the center of the greenroom and shouted, “Places!” 

“Darling,” said Eames, sidling over to him—as he should, because his entrance in Act II came from Arthur’s side of the stage. “Have I mentioned yet how fetching you are in black?” 

Arthur looked down at himself, even though he knew what he would find: black sneakers, black socks, black jeans, black long-sleeved shirt. Black headset, if you wanted to be thorough about it. 

“I’m not sure,” said Arthur. 

The Eames of every previous production had done the pet names and usual innuendos—usual for Eames, that was, not for anybody else on the planet—but Previous Eames had tended to completely ignore him during performances proper, so it seemed likely that he had not commented on the apparent phenomenon that was Arthur in black. 

Previous Eames, of course, had not badgered Arthur into running lines with him, nor eaten what Arthur now realized was an absurd amount of meals with him, nor made Arthur laugh. Which Current Eames did with alarming frequency. 

“Well, you are very fetching in black,” said Eames. “Shall we?” 

Eames held open the door to backstage and ushered Arthur through, one hand on his back. 

“Break a leg,” Arthur whispered as Dom called for the house lights to go out. 

Eames blew him a kiss. “You know my entrance in Act II isn’t for a few minutes, right?” 

Arthur _shh_ ed him. Of course he knew when Eames’s entrance was. He knew all of Eames’s entrances. He knew all of Eames’s _lines_. 

They stood together in silence (obviously) until just before Eames’s cue, at which point Eames brushed his fingers against the back of Arthur’s hand and stepped toward the curtain. 

Arthur sat down in the dark. 

He couldn’t—he wasn’t sure—what was this? What was he doing?

What was _Eames_ doing?

He wished they would stop being interrupted by Eames’s entrances. 

(Did he?)

But what would he have done, if instead of letting Eames walk away, and away, and away, he could have grabbed his hand and kept him there? 

What would he do, once the demands of Jack’s life stopped cutting their conversations short? 

He kept reaching for the talk button on his headset, desperate for Ariadne to tell him—something. Anything.

_After_ , he reminded himself. _Don’t drag your own mess into the show._

But Act III was nowhere near long enough for Arthur to resolve any of this by himself.

All too quickly, the first performance was over. And it hadn’t been a disaster, not at all. Robert had only fumbled one of his lines, nothing had gone missing from the prop table, and no china sets had been broken in the making of this play (that night, at least). 

Basically a fucking miracle. 

Eames rushed off stage after the final bows. 

“Well, darling?” he asked. 

“Very impressive,” said Arthur. 

“I aim to please,” said Eames, and then everybody else was also backstage and pushing them out into the greenroom and talking over each other, and Arthur remembered just how much adrenaline was involved in theatre (why did he keep forgetting these things?), you were on high alert all the fucking time, no wonder everybody slept fourteen hours straight after final performances. 

Arthur spotted Ariadne on the other side of the room and pushed between actors until he could grab her arm. 

“I think I need help,” he announced. 

“I’m sorry?” she said. 

“Eames,” Arthur said plaintively. 

“You don’t need help,” said Ariadne. 

“Yes, I do,” Arthur insisted. 

Ariadne just rolled her eyes as Mal swept into the greenroom. 

“You were all marvelous,” Mal beamed. “Go home! We’re going to do this all again tomorrow!” 

“Wait!” Arthur called out over the din. “Costumes to costume crew, make sure your props are where they need to be. Drink lots of water tonight, save the other kind of drinking for the after party tomorrow. For God’s sake, _sleep_.” 

Everyone nodded solemnly. 

“Okay,” said Arthur. “Be gone with you.”

Arthur and Eames did their usual dance of busying themselves until they thought the other was ready to leave. At least, that was what Arthur was doing, which normally worked out fine, because he really did have a lot of things on his post-rehearsal/performance to-do list. 

“Shall we?” said Eames as Arthur stepped back into the greenroom, after having gone backstage to turn off his blue light. 

Arthur nodded. “No wild parties tonight?” 

“Following instructions, you know me.” 

They crossed the dark lobby and exited into the night. 

“It was good?” Eames ventured, once they’d left the theatre sufficiently behind. 

“Of course,” said Arthur. “It was great.”

“But do you still laugh?” 

“I’ve been listening to you have the same conversations over and over again for weeks,” said Arthur. 

“I know,” said Eames. “Thank you, darling.” 

A pause.

“Did you still laugh?” 

“ _Yes_ ,” said Arthur. “Tonight, yes, because opening night is like watching it for the first time all over again and the audience is there and—the audience _loved_ you, by the way, did you notice?” 

“Did they?” 

“They did. Appalling taste,” said Arthur, letting himself knock into Eames, just a bit, to emphasize that he was joking. 

Eames walked Arthur to the door of Arthur’s dorm, as per their usual pattern. 

_He walks me home_ , Arthur thought. 

It was very unfair that Eames could be so… so Eames… and so… _boyfriend-y_ , when he wasn’t Arthur’s boyfriend. 

They stopped outside the door. Eames squinted at Arthur, his nose wrinkling a little. 

Arthur swallowed. This wasn’t… was there a thing, that was happening? That was going to happen? 

Eames lifted a hand, brushed his thumb over Arthur’s cheekbone, the tip of his nose. 

“After,” said Arthur quickly, before he could suggest something very, very stupid. 

Eames nodded and let his hand fall. 

_No, put it back_ , Arthur wanted to say. _Mine. Give it back. Don’t stop._

“Good night, sweetheart,” said Eames. 

As he turned to cross the courtyard, Arthur could hear him whistling. He didn’t recognize the song. Maybe it was an Eames original.


	10. Chapter 10

Arthur had a routine for final performances. 

First performance outfits were tight jeans and fitted t-shirts, always long-sleeved, no matter the season. First performance outfits were meant to disarm and charm the cast into thinking Arthur was a Normal Person who wore things like skinny jeans and tight black t-shirts. 

Middle performances, when they existed, were for wearing the kinds of clothes Arthur normally wore—sweaters, pants with actual pleats and the like—but in black. 

Final performances, though, were his favorite. 

For final performances, he brought out his suit. 

It was a very nice three-piece suit, every stitch of it black. It had been a present from his mom after finishing his first year of college with straight A's. 

People were always confused about why Arthur had received an end-of-first-year-of-college present as opposed to a high school graduation present, but what Arthur generally didn’t going around telling people was that his mom had never gone to college, so Arthur finishing that first year was far more significant to them than Arthur holding a piece of paper that said he _could_ go to college. 

Plus, his mom had felt bad about the fact that Arthur had bought his own high school graduation present: a new laptop, using the money he’d saved up over multiple birthdays, Christmases, and his part-time job as a French tutor. 

Arthur didn’t care what other people thought of their present-giving habits. He had a good laptop and a lovely suit and an amazing mother, and in a little over a year he was going to graduate from college and he hadn’t needed a father to make it this far. So there. 

Before putting on the suit and preparing himself for the second show, however, Arthur had dinner with Ian, who was coming to that night’s performance. 

“… just ignore when the lights do anything funny and concentrate on Eames, it’s fantastic,” Arthur finished, waving his fork in the air. 

Ian leaned back in his chair. “You realize you just spent five minutes telling me about how great Eames is.” 

“I did not,” said Arthur. “I told you about the show.”

“No,” said Ian. “You definitely just told me about Eames.” 

“Oh,” said Arthur, blushing. 

Ian smirked. “So, are we ever going to talk about Eames, or are we going to pretend that this is a thing that isn’t happening? Because when we roomed together, yeah, you talked about Eames all the time, but it was mostly of the ‘I am going to murder him if he touches one more prop that isn’t his’ variety.’” 

“He’s matured!” Arthur insisted. 

“This is so perfect,” said Ian, laughing. “I should be fucking recording this.” 

“Stop it,” said Arthur. “He left me a sonnet in my script.” 

Ian stopped laughing. “Wait. This is actually a thing? Like, a serious… relationship?” 

“Ugh.” Arthur buried his head in his hands. 

Ian had had the same girlfriend since the second month of their first year of college and they worked adequately well together, Arthur supposed, and he and Ian mostly didn’t talk about her, because Arthur rarely hung out with _them_ because Arthur had quite enough third-wheeling with Dom and Mal, thank you very much. 

“Fuck it, I don’t know what I’m doing here, talk to Mal if you need advice,” said Ian. “But sonnets, man? That’s pretty _something_.”

“Yeah,” said Arthur. “That’s Eames.” 

“Are you still doing the suit thing, for the last show?” Ian asked. 

Arthur nodded. 

“Then you have nothing to worry about,” said Ian, and flicked a piece of rice at him. 

 

“Darling, are you trying to kill me here?” Eames asked as soon as he’d spotted Arthur in the greenroom. 

“Sorry, what?” Arthur asked innocently. 

“You’re all, you know,” said Eames, flapping a hand at him. 

“Yes,” said Arthur. “Indeed.” 

“I need Ariadne,” Eames said, his tone mournful. 

“You need to get changed,” said Arthur.

“But first, Ariadne,” said Eames, and disappeared backstage.

“Arthur to Ariadne,” said Arthur into his headset.

“Yup, Eames is here, sending him back shortly,” replied Ariadne. 

_I feel like we have shared custody_ , Arthur thought, and then stopped that train of thought immediately, because Eames was not his kid and Ariadne was—no, not even going to finish that. Moving on. 

Dom appeared, waving his headset pack in his hand. 

“It’s not working,” he claimed. “I’ve been calling you for the last five minutes.” 

Arthur held out his hand. “Let me see.” 

“How can I call the show if my headset doesn’t work?” Dom complained. 

“You’d take Nash’s,” said Arthur, unbothered. 

“I can’t take Nash’s, he’s an ASM,” said Dom. “I’d have to take Ariadne’s.”

“No one is taking Ariadne’s headset away,” said Arthur. “Anyway, it’s just out of batteries.” 

“What?” said Dom.

“Your headset. Needs new batteries. Seriously, you rushed down here for that?” Arthur turned away to find new batteries. 

“Does Mal love me? Is she _in love_ with me?” Dom asked abruptly, as Arthur bent over to rummage through a toolbox that mostly contained things that were not, strictly speaking, tools. 

“Uh,” said Arthur. “Talk to Mal?” 

“But what has she said to you?” Dom pressed. 

“Mal and I do occasionally talk about other things besides your relationship,” said Arthur.

“Like what?” asked Dom, as if genuinely confused. 

“Paisley versus polka dots. A definitive ranking of the best Bonds, by outfits alone. Napoleon,” said Arthur. He found the proper batteries and began to swap them with the headset’s dead pair. 

“That sounds awful,” said Dom. 

“That’s why Mal and I talk about that stuff together, not with you,” said Arthur. 

“But… do we have a _future_ together?” Dom asked as Arthur handed him back his headset. 

“I can’t do this right now,” said Arthur. “We are about to put on a show. Save this for the after party, okay?” 

“The after party.” Dom nodded fervently. “Okay. Thanks, Arthur.” 

After he walked away, Arthur pressed the talk button on his own headset pack. “Arthur to Ariadne.”

“A little busy here,” Ariadne replied. 

“Is the cigarette case missing again?”

“Uh, no?” 

“Ariadne—”

“No, it’s not, the props are fine.”

“So what, exactly, isn’t fine?” 

“Did you need something?” she asked. 

Arthur could hear someone mumbling next to her. Nash, maybe. 

“Yeah,” said Arthur. “Don’t let me go to the after party.”

There was a pause. A long pause. 

“Okay,” Ariadne said, finally. “No after party for Arthur, got it.” 

“Really?” 

“You can’t back out now,” said Ariadne. “God, why do you make my life so easy?”

“Why is this making your life easy?” asked Arthur suspiciously.

“I thought I was going to have to _scheme_ ,” said Ariadne, her tone serious. 

“Okay? Well, anyway, Dom wants to corner me to talk about the future of his and Mal’s relationship, so—”

“Hey!” Dom protested. 

“Dom, turn off the headset for a minute and make sure the side doors are unlocked,” Arthur instructed. 

“Fine,” said Dom. 

“Oh my God, you poor thing,” said Ariadne. “I’ve definitely got you covered. Or, well, not me, exactly, but, hang on.” 

Silence. 

“Darling, want to skip the after party with me?” Eames. 

“Yes,” said Arthur. He definitely wanted to skip the after party with Eames. “You need to come back out here and get ready.” 

“Are you still in the greenroom?” 

“Yes.” 

“Still in the suit?” 

“What else would I be wearing?” 

There was a loaded pause, a kind of ‘insert your own innuendo here’ pause. 

“Definitely still wearing clothing,” Arthur said. 

“Damn,” said Eames. “Okay, just, go backstage and do fiddly stage managery things. I can’t concentrate when you’re standing there looking all bloody gorgeous and competent with the bloody headset.” 

“Headsets are not sexy,” said Arthur. 

“Agree to disagree,” said Eames. “Go away. I’m giving the headset back now.” 

Arthur obediently went backstage. 

“Arthur to Ariadne,” he said. 

“Here,” she said, a bit wearily. 

“Is Eames okay?” 

“He wasn’t sneezing,” she said. 

“Good,” said Arthur. “But, you know, is he okay?” 

“He went into temporary shock after seeing you in your suit, and I haven’t actually seen you in person tonight, so I can’t offer my perspective on things, but apparently it is really, and I quote, fucking tight and you are very fucking hot and he just needed to kind of whimper a bit.” 

“Oh,” said Arthur. “Um, are you being…?”

“Facetious?” Ariadne prompted. “I wish.” 

“Oh,” said Arthur again. 

He didn’t sit on the ground, because his suit was really fucking nice, okay, but he sort of leaned against the wall and thought about sitting down. 

“So, Eames wanted to skip the after party, before I brought it up?” he asked. 

“Yup,” said Ariadne, who evidently had no qualms about spilling her best friend’s secrets via headset. “He’s really fucking gone for you and you’re going to be the best boyfriend in the fucking universe to him, because if you don’t, I will ruin every theatre production you work on next year, and I know you’ve been convincing Saito to make the department’s fall show something by Molière.” 

“I, okay,” said Arthur, and part of him was leaping across some internal stage because holy fuck, Ariadne said Eames was _really fucking gone for him_ and that was the best news in Arthur’s life since—since a while, anyway, and, and, it wasn’t completely out of the blue because of all of the _touching_ that had been happening, but, still, actors tended to be physical sorts of people and—“Isn’t Eames going to be upset that you told me, instead of letting him do it?”

It didn’t feel real, exactly, with Ariadne telling him instead of Eames. He didn’t think it would feel real until Eames said something. If Eames ever said something. Arthur still wasn’t convinced.

( _You told him ‘after.’ You insisted on after_ , Arthur reminded himself.) 

“I did let him do it, you idiot,” said Ariadne. 

“What?” 

“The sonnets? Your interminable parade of breakfasts and dinners and walks home under the moonlight?” 

“I thought they were platonic sonnets,” said Arthur.

“Arthur. You are an amazing stage manager, but a very stupid person. There is no such thing as a platonic Shakespearean sonnet.” 

(More internal skips. Across the great stage of _life_ because _Eames_ and _non-platonic sonnets_.)

“You’re sure?” he asked. Just to be sure.

“Very, very sure.”

Arthur glanced at his watch. “I need to call ten minutes?” 

“You do that,” said Ariadne. 

As Arthur listened to the show from behind the curtains for the last time, he thought that he should probably feel sad, because this was his last show with Dom and Mal, and they were graduating, and he would miss them, even though they were much better friends than they were theatre production partners. He tried to conjure up some sort of achy feeling that might be appropriate, but—nothing. Maybe he would miss them more next fall, when somebody sane and boring was directing _The Misanthrope_ or _Tartuffe_. (Well, someone slightly more sane and slightly more boring, because this was theatre, and you got kicked out if you were not called ‘a character’ or ‘a bit too much’ or something else quirky and hipster at least once a week.) 

Maybe he’d never miss Mal and Dom from backstage, and instead miss them at noon when he would normally be getting lunch with Mal, or the kind of midnight when he and Dom would play video games together because Mal had wheedled her way into being in a proper city for inexplicable cultural reasons and temporarily abandoned them. 

Although, now that Arthur thought about it, he and Dom could still play video games on those midnights, even when Mal and Dom were off somewhere else in the world, worrying about things other than theatre department politics and who had checked out the library’s only copy of the book you needed to write your paper. The Internet was helpful that way. 

But he wasn’t sad, not now. He didn’t think Mal was going to be sad, either. Oh, she would be _dramatic_ at the after party (the after party he would miss), but she was made for better things, bigger things and more striking skylines than what could be found at a university in the American heartland. And she knew it, and she was ready. 

Mostly, Arthur was excited, and listening to Eames deliver his oh-so-familiar lines was slightly hypnotizing. His excitement settled. He knew the lines; he knew what was going to happen; he knew which bits made him laugh almost every time. He already knew the story Eames was telling, and he loved it. He already knew the story Eames was telling, and he was confident in how it would end, and that made it easy to (mentally) sit back, and listen, and keep falling, and wait. 

Intermission came. 

Robert talked at Arthur, inexplicably, most of the time. Arthur tried to nod and made appropriate listening noises, but really he was looking across to the other corner of the greenroom, where Eames and Ariadne were talking. Eames kept glancing toward him. When their eyes met, Eames would grin, and Arthur could feel his own smile tugging across his face in response. 

“Ariadne to Arthur,” Ariadne said over the headset. 

Arthur frowned and looked across the room. Ariadne grinned and tapped her headset. 

“Can I call two minutes and then places?” she asked. “Please? I haven’t gotten to shout nearly as much as Eames promised me.” 

Eames turned now to look at him, and even from the other side of the room, Arthur could tell that he was rolling his eyes. 

“Go ahead,” said Arthur. 

“What?” said Robert. 

“Nothing,” said Arthur. “Tech crew stuff.” 

Ariadne crossed to the center of the room.

“Two minutes!” she bellowed. 

Everyone turned to Arthur. 

“Ariadne, I think you might need to repeat yourself. Everyone looks very confused,” said Arthur mildly. 

“Two minutes!” Ariadne said again, just as loudly. 

“Thank you, two minutes!” Eames shouted back, and the rest of the actors followed suit. 

“I need to go get ready,” said Arthur. 

“Oh, right,” said Robert. “It was really nice working with you on this one.” 

“Thanks,” said Arthur, already stepping away. He paused, though, smiled. “Save it for the after party.” 

Robert’s eyes widened. 

“Ready for Act II, Robert?” Eames asked, appearing beside them. 

“Of course,” said Robert. He coughed. “It’s been… nice working with you. On this. You’re very talented.” 

“Isn’t he sweet, darling?” Eames said to Arthur. 

“Uh, see you guys at the after party,” said Robert, looking uncomfortable and backing away. 

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world!” Eames called after him. 

“You’re joking, right?” Arthur asked, his eyes narrowed. 

“Am I joking about missing the after party?” Eames stared at him. “Sweetheart. Of course I am missing the fucking after party. We have _plans_.”

“You have plans,” Arthur corrected. “I’m just… along for the ride.” 

“But with me. So, the two of us, together, hence the ‘we,’” said Eames. 

“Places!” shouted Ariadne. 

Arthur nodded at her once, then disappeared backstage, Eames following behind. 

“Ready to go be Jack, one last time?” Arthur whispered as the house lights went out. 

“Darling, I’m Ernest, remember?”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another thousand thank-yous to Castillon for being such a brilliant beta. I clearly saved many kittens in some past life. I am endlessly grateful for your discerning eye, prescient questioning of pacing and motivation, and generous love for these stupid boys.

There was applause, a lot of it, all of it very well-deserved. 

The crew came out and took their bows. 

More applause. Arthur could hear Ian’s whistle and grinned, because they had _done it_ and it had been amazing and now it was over. Now, there was Eames. 

When the cast and crew arranged themselves in lines for one final bow, Eames grabbed Arthur’s hand and pulled him next to him. Eames didn’t let go even as they walked offstage. 

When they reached the greenroom, they were inevitably separated, pulled into sweaty hugs by everyone, and then by everyone again. 

“I’m free!” Mal proclaimed, kissing Arthur on each cheek. 

“Can I keep the headset?” Ariadne asked. 

“No,” said Arthur. “But you can do props again in the fall.” 

“And you promise me a headset?” 

“Done,” said Arthur. 

Dom’s hug involved a lot of back-patting. Dom didn’t really know how to give satisfying hugs, but that didn’t stop him from trying. 

Robert kept trying to approach him, but Arthur would quickly find himself engrossed in conversation and angle himself such that other people formed a constant roadblock. He didn’t really want to deal with Robert just then. 

Eventually, he found Eames again. 

“What’s the plan?” he asked. 

“We get everybody to strike the set in record time,” Eames said, “and then we flee.” 

“Got it,” said Arthur. 

Eames tugged, lightly, on the shoulder of Arthur’s suit jacket. “You brought something else to wear, right? Because there’s no way you can strike in that.” 

“I am a battle-worn theatre veteran,” Arthur assured him. 

“I won’t even make you climb anything,” said Eames, very solemnly. 

Arthur turned to face the rest of the greenroom. 

“Okay, people!” he shouted. “Assignments from Ariadne. Let’s get this done, and then we can go to the after party.” 

There were cheers, and then Ariadne stepped to the center of the room and began pointing at people, calling out tasks. 

Arthur slipped away to change and deal with the various accoutrements of stage management: scripts and extra pens and binder clips and flashlights and four kinds of tape and more besides.

The full backstage lights were on, for once, and everything that looked mysterious and purposeful under the bluelight now simply appeared dusty and ordinary. 

“Knock knock,” Ian called, flapping a curtain. 

“If you pull that down, Saito will murder you and no one will ever find your body,” Arthur said, pulling it back and letting his friend into the sanctum sanctorum. 

“I’ve come to save your suit from strike,” said Ian. 

Arthur plucked the garment bag from where he’d hung it on an uncovered pipe and passed it to Ian. 

“Thank you,” said Arthur.

“We wouldn’t want anything to happen to this,” said Ian solemnly, lifting the bag in salute. “Anyway, your Eames.” 

“He’s not _my_ Eames,” Arthur protested.

“Uh-huh. Like he wasn’t holding your hand out there, looking like a five-year-old on Christmas morning,” said Ian, eyebrows raised. 

“He just starred in a fantastic play,” said Arthur. 

“He did,” Ian agreed. “And I thought he was great. But as far as I could tell from the twenty seconds in which you were onstage, he was way more focused on you than in reveling in his stardom.” 

Arthur didn’t know what to say to that. 

Ian smirked at him. “So I’ll leave you to it. Come get your stuff whenever. Don’t text me when you start freaking out—just talk to Eames.” 

“I’m not freaking out,” said Arthur. 

“Yeah, okay. Bye!” said Ian. He waved cheerfully before ducking back through the curtain. 

Arthur was pulling up glowtape from the floor when Eames found him. Eames had washed the stage makeup off his face and changed into faded jeans and one of the bright purple show t-shirts Ariadne had handed out at the cast and crew dinner the night before. 

Eames clutched at his chest when he spotted Arthur.

“What?” said Arthur.

“Be still my heart,” said Eames. “Are you wearing _joggers_?” 

“I’m wearing sweatpants,” Arthur defended himself. 

They were _comfortable_ and Arthur always permitted himself sweatpants during strike. Always. So there. 

Eames collapsed onto the ground beside him. “Why would you do this to me?” 

“I wasn’t aware we were going to have plans after,” said Arthur. 

“I am delighted that you realize that _we_ have plans,” said Eames. “Also, you told me ‘after,’ remember?” 

“Well, yes,” said Arthur, “but I didn’t necessarily think there would be a whole… plan.”

“Of course there’s a whole plan,” said Eames. “What do you take me for? An Arthur amateur?” 

Ariadne stomped through before Arthur could reply. 

“I have another condition,” she announced.

“What?” said both Arthur and Eames. 

She ignored Eames and focused on Arthur. “No Nash, okay? No Nash in the fall. No Nash ever again. Or there will be hell to pay, and I mean that in the most literal sense imaginable.” 

“No Nash,” Arthur agreed. 

Ariadne propped her hands on her hips. “Are you two going to help or are you just going to flirt in empty backstage crannies until I dismiss you?” 

“Help,” said Arthur, holding up the glowtape pieces he’d scraped from the floor.

“Flirt,” said Eames. 

“Well, _I_ ’d like to go flirt with Yusuf, but somebody has to be responsible around here,” said Ariadne. 

“You’ve got the whole after party!” Eames protested. 

“You know perfectly well that strikes are made for flirting and after parties are made for getting beyond simple flirtation,” said Ariadne. “That’s why all the strike tasks are assigned to pairs, duh.” 

Eames, who had been inching closer and closer to Arthur throughout the conversation, slumped into him, resting his head on Arthur’s shoulder. 

“We’re not moving,” Arthur said immediately. 

“Up,” said Ariadne, poking Eames’s knee with her foot. “You can do trash run.” 

“Why do we want to do trash run?” Arthur asked. 

He’d never done trash run before: he’d always been far too busy organizing backstage and/or the lighting booth. 

“Because we can be relatively slow and spend the majority of the strike alone,” Eames said, hopping up. 

“Don’t make me regret this,” said Ariadne. 

Eames grabbed Arthur’s hands and pulled him up. (He didn’t let go.) 

“We’ll be the most efficient trash team you’ve ever had,” Arthur promised. 

“Uh-huh,” said Ariadne. 

Arthur bit his lip. This—this whole—Eames thing—wasn’t his style. He wasn’t the one who flitted off with the grudging approval of more conscientious people. He was normally the last person to leave strike, not the first person to disappear from the theatre (even for semi-legitimate trash run purposes). 

“Hey,” said Ariadne. “It’s fine, I’ve got this under control.” 

“Are you sure? Because, seriously, Eames and I—” he began. 

“You keep the backstage pretty spotless and you’ve already gathered your stuff, so it’s organized enough for somebody else to finish. I’m perfectly capable of managing everybody else,” said Ariadne. “Unless you disagree?” 

“Of course he doesn’t,” said Eames. 

“Do you want to be my ASM next year?” Arthur asked. 

Ariadne wrinkled her nose. “I really think I prefer props. But I’ll let you know. And I get to keep my headset either way!” 

“Yes, definitely,” Arthur agreed. 

“That’s settled, then,” said Ariadne. “Do you know where the big dumpster is?” 

“I do,” said Eames. 

“Good,” said Ariadne, nodding. “The wall’s coming down pretty quickly, so the bin might already be full. Shoo.” 

Sure enough, the large gray bin onstage was almost full of plywood. 

They made four trash runs before the theatre was declared empty. 

The cast and crew huddled in the lobby as Ariadne and Arthur (unofficially accompanied by Eames) made a final walk-through of the theatre, backstage, and greenroom. 

“That’s it, everybody,” Arthur said, upon their return. “Thanks for all of your hard work, and thanks to Ariadne for organizing tonight.” 

“Thank you, Ariadne!” everyone shouted, well trained at last. 

“If you’re coming to the after party, let’s go,” said Dom. 

“Who _isn’t_ coming to the after party?” Robert wondered as the small crowd began to follow Dom and Mal outside. 

Arthur turned to Eames. “We can go, if you want. I mean, you were the _star of the show_ , so if you’d like to go—” 

“Darling, I have been to an awful lot of after parties in my life, and I’m expecting to go to many more of them in the future,” said Eames. “But we have plans tonight.”

“We can have plans any night, if you want to go to the party,” said Arthur. 

The lobby was empty now; even Ariadne had deserted them. 

“Can we? Have plans any other night, I mean?” Eames asked. 

“Yes.” 

“I want this one,” said Eames. “This one _first_ , and then all the others.” 

“Okay,” said Arthur. 

“Good,” said Eames. “Shall we?”

“I don’t know where we’re going,” said Arthur.

“Where we always go,” said Eames, as they exited the lobby. 

“Our separate dorms?” 

“Okay, where _I_ always go and you never quite get to, because we go to your door first,” Eames said. “I bribed the RA to send everyone to the other kitchen, so everything should still be more or less ready to go.” 

“The kitchen?” 

“The kitchen,” Eames confirmed. 

In the dark, their hands brushed. Eames held on, lacing their fingers together. 

“Is this okay, love?” he asked. 

“Yes,” said Arthur, his voice calm, even though his heart was pounding and he felt giddy with anticipation, and not at all as if he’d been up until two or three every night this past week. 

They walked in silence past STU, past Du Nord, past the language building. Arthur had come to appreciate the distance between the theatre and their dorms—more guaranteed Eames time—but now he wasn’t so sure. He wanted to get to Eames’s plan. 

“It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?” Eames said abruptly. 

“Are you attempting to seduce me with Wilde?” Arthur asked, grinning.

“I’m always trying to seduce you with Wilde,” Eames said. “I got you to have the same conversations with me, over and over again, didn’t I?” 

Arthur narrowed his eyes. “You _tricked_ me.” 

“Whatever do you mean?” Eames asked. Arthur could hear his satisfied smile. 

“You already knew your lines!” Arthur accused. 

“Perhaps,” said Eames, squeezing his hand. 

“You so did,” grumbled Arthur. 

“Would you have preferred to help Robert instead?” 

Arthur shuddered. “No. But, you know, next time—”

“Next time?” 

“Next time, I can help you memorize your lines the first time around, or you can work whatever magic you do that lets you memorize them almost immediately and we can put the time we would have spent on memorization to better use,” said Arthur. 

“I like the way you think,” said Eames. 

They reached the entrance to Eames’s dorm; Eames swiped his ID card and led them inside and down the hall. 

They stopped at the entrance to the tiny kitchen, where a bored-looking girl was sitting on the table, playing with her phone. She looked up at their arrival. 

“Finally,” she said, hopping down from the table. “All yours.” 

“I told you strike would take a while,” said Eames. 

“You must be Arthur,” said the RA. She squinted at him, cocking her head, making no effort to conceal her evaluation. 

“Hi,” said Arthur. “Thanks for, uh, holding the kitchen for us.” 

“Yeah, well, now your boy owes me one, so there’s that,” she replied. “Plus tomorrow I’ll be heralded as the most trusted source for new Eames gossip.” 

“Go sleep or find some drunk first years to scold,” said Eames. 

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, stepping around Arthur. “No fires, okay?” 

“No fires,” Eames confirmed. 

Eames began to pull out ingredients from the cupboards: flour, sugar, baking soda… 

“So, I guess now would be a good time to ask what we’re doing here?” said Arthur. 

Eames unearthed a large mixing bowl with a flourish. “Cookies!” 

“Oh no,” said Arthur. “You know I always burn them, right?” 

“Exactly,” said Eames. 

“What?” 

“You need a new surprising fact, darling. So I’m fixing this one for you,” said Eames. 

“We’re going to bake cookies?” 

“Yes. And we’re not going to burn any of them.” 

“You sound very confident about that.” 

“I have never burned a batch of cookies in my life, and I’m not going to start tonight.” 

“Just don’t be mad if I break your streak?” Arthur suggested. 

“I’m sure we could work something out,” said Eames, digging through a drawer for measuring spoons. 

Measuring paraphernalia acquired, Eames pulled out his phone, tapping on it until, apparently having found what he was looking for, he passed it to Arthur. 

“What am I looking at?” Arthur said, even before looking down at the screen.

“I got my mum to send us a picture of her recipe, converted into American measurements,” said Eames. “A process that revealed a shocking amount of ignorance on her part regarding how her phone actually works, by the way, so we’re definitely not burning these cookies.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Arthur dubiously, and placed the phone on the counter. 

“Sweetheart,” said Eames, “you _are_ the best.” 

Arthur rolled his eyes. 

Making cookies, or at least making cookies with Eames, was a messy business. Spilled granules of sugar soon dusted Eames’s bright t-shirt, and a rakish streak of baking powder somehow ended up on his cheek. The mess wasn’t content to contain itself to Eames, of course: hastily poured flour ended up on counter and, through a series of complicated events involving both of them reaching for various utensils at the same time, subsequently ended up all over Arthur’s sweatpants. Eames had looked very pleased with himself, so Arthur had just sighed and ceded the bowl to him. 

Once an inordinate amount of chocolate chips had been mixed into the dough, Eames grabbed spoons for each of them, and they began to distribute the lumps onto the baking pan. 

“You’re doing splendidly so far,” Eames teased. 

“As you might remember, it’s never the dough that’s the issue,” said Arthur. “And does this count, anyway, if you’re helping?” 

“I promise to let you take them out of the oven all by yourself,” said Eames, who threw in a wink for good measure. 

Arthur scraped a final dough ball onto the pan. 

“Acceptable?” he asked. 

Eames peered over the rows, then ceremoniously snagged a stray chocolate chip from off of the counter and pushed it into an apparently deficient dough-lump. 

“Yes,” Eames declared. 

The oven was already ready, so Eames opened the oven door and Arthur slipped the cookie sheet inside. 

“Next tray!” Eames said happily, and began shaping even more dough-balls.

Arthur eyed the mostly-full bowl. “We are going to have to do many trays.” 

“Exactly,” said Eames. “Thus we will have many, many cookies. Some of which we owe to my RA, by the way.”

“Speaking of,” said Arthur. “What does she know about me? Or think that she knows about me?” 

Eames set his spoon down. 

Arthur felt a lump rise in his throat. Was he misinterpreting everything? Was this not—he thought that—and Ariadne—

“Amy was my RA last year, too,” said Eames. 

“Okay,” said Arthur. 

“So she was an occasional witness to rehearsal aftermaths,” said Eames. 

“Oh,” said Arthur. 

“I was very stupid last year,” said Eames. “I—well, you know. You were there. I wasn’t seeing a lot of things clearly. Including myself.” 

“That… happens. To a lot of people,” said Arthur awkwardly. 

“Not to you.”

“Yes, to me,” said Arthur. “I really don’t think you would have liked my seventeen-year-old self. I don’t like my seventeen-year-old self.” 

Eames looked at him oddly. No, fondly, Arthur decided. Eames’s eyes were soft and Arthur couldn’t figure out what he’d ever done to deserve that. 

“I think you’re harder on yourself than you need to be,” said Eames. “And I wasn’t hard enough on myself.” 

Arthur looked down at the floor. The linoleum was dusted with flour and baking soda. 

“I’ve been—trying,” said Eames. 

“I’ve noticed,” said Arthur. “And, well, you’ve always been brilliant, but this time? You were phenomenal.” 

“Not just about the play. I haven’t just been trying for acting’s sake,” said Eames with a small smile. 

“I’ve noticed that, too.”

“You notice everything, don’t you?” Eames reached out, brushing his fingers along Arthur’s cheek, an echo of the night before. 

“Now’s after,” Arthur pointed out. 

“And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow?” Eames asked. 

“Yes, all of them,” said Arthur. He took a deep breath. “I mean it. I want the tomorrows, or—or not _this_ ‘after.’” 

“Given that we just finished a play involving an awful lot of misdirection, misunderstanding, and miscommunication, maybe we should be explicit,” said Eames. 

Arthur stifled a laugh. 

Eames flashed a grin, but his face quickly grew serious. “So, clarity?” 

Arthur nodded. 

“I really, really like you. I’ve been a bit of a fuck-up in the past, but I’m working on it—I’m working on _everything_ —and I _adore_ you, and you deserve absolutely everything—”

“Nobody gets everything,” said Arthur.

“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling,” said Eames. 

Arthur considered this, then: “‘Adore,’ really? Because Ariadne told me you were ‘really fucking gone for me.’” 

“I _am_ ,” Eames insisted, and suddenly he was standing much, much closer to Arthur, and their eyes met and Arthur could not look away, not for the life of him, not for a fire alarm or the freaking zombie apocalypse. Everything was Eames’s eyes and Eames’s eyes were everything. 

“Me, too,” said Arthur. “I mean—”

“If I were as kick-ass as you, I’d definitely be really fucking gone for myself, too,” said Eames, but quietly. They were standing too close to be loud. 

“Shut up,” said Arthur. “You are impossibly amazing at basically everything and you know it.” 

“Doesn’t mean it’s not nice to hear it from you,” said Eames. 

Arthur ducked his head. “Um, anyway. What you said. I feel that, too. About you.”

 _You’re so embarrassing_ , Arthur told himself. _Why can’t you talk like a normal person. Why is this such a disaster. Why are you so awkward._

“Can I just…?” Arthur asked. 

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but the answer is probably yes,” Eames said. 

So Arthur closed that last, tiniest bit of space between them and kissed him. Just a little. Just enough. (For now.) 

“Oh,” said Eames. 

“Clear?” Arthur asked. 

“Um,” said Eames. “Yeah. Although. We could, again?” 

They kissed again, and again, tiny, brief kisses until Arthur started laughing, and Eames stopped kissing his lips and starting kissing his cheeks, his nose, his temple. 

“You’re so fucking wonderful, you know that, right?” Eames said, kissing his way along Arthur’s jaw. 

“Come _here_ ,” Arthur whined, and pulled Eames back in for a proper kiss. 

The timer went off. 

“Cookies,” Eames said at once. 

“Cookies,” Arthur repeated dumbly.

There were still cookies in the world, a world in which Eames would kiss him, would _adore_ him? 

Eames handed the baking mitts to Arthur. “Go on,” he instructed. “Quick, before they burn!”

“Oh, right,” said Arthur, and stumbled toward the oven. 

When he pulled out the tray, the cookies were perfect. 

Eames quickly formed a few more dough-balls and slid the next tray in, and they stood for a moment, admiring the fluffy, golden-brown array of sweetness before them. 

“We have to let them cool for a minute,” said Eames. 

“Okay,” said Arthur, who was willing to defer to Eames on all cookie-related matters at this point. And then, because he was _very stupid_ and also _very fucking gone for Eames_ , he asked, “What are we doing?” 

Eames stopped admiring the cookies and turned to him, confused. “Baking cookies, aren’t we?” 

“Right, but—like, what are _we_ —” Arthur began.

His cheeks felt hot and he wondered why this was so awful, they had _kissed_ and it had been _wonderful_ and he just kind of needed to make sure that would happen again? Not necessarily immediately. Although he wasn’t necessarily against an immediate repeat, either. Just. Sometime. Soon-ish. 

“Well,” Eames began. “I thought we’d finish baking the cookies, and then take them back to my room and eat a bunch while they’re still warm and gooey and maybe, like, cuddle, if that’s a thing you do, because I’m pretty fucking exhausted, but I’m also kind of worried that if I let you out of my sight, you’ll disappear and I’ll realize this was all, I dunno, a stress-induced projection. So that’s tonight. And then tomorrow we’ll do brunch like we normally do on weekends and we can hold hands in the omelet line. After, you’ll probably want to do homework, so I’ll crash your library table and convince you to kiss me in the stairwell, and then you’ll have dinner with Ian and I’ll have dinner with Ari and we’ll text obnoxiously throughout the whole thing. If you want.” 

Arthur’s brain had more or less short-circuited at that point from the perfection of the plan Eames was offering. 

“That sounds really, really good,” said Arthur. “Yes. Let’s do that.” 

Eames squinted at him. “Yes?” 

“ _Yes_ ,” Arthur insisted. 

To prove his point, he pulled his notebook and a pencil out of his pocket and flipped to a fresh page. 

SATURDAY NIGHT, he wrote. EAT COOKIES. CUDDLE WITH EAMES. 

He skipped a few lines. SUNDAY MORNING. BRUNCH WITH EAMES. HOLD HANDS. Next line. SUNDAY AFTERNOON. STUDY IN LIBRARY (WITH EAMES). BE CONVINCED TO KISS IN STAIRWELL. Next line. SUNDAY EVENING. DINNER WITH IAN (TEXT EAMES). 

“Darling,” said Eames, as if that were a complete sentence. 

“Cookies,” said Arthur. “We’ve got one perfect batch already and the rest of them are going to be that way, too.” 

“If you say so, love. You know best,” said Eames, picking up the spatula and preparing to relieve the first tray of its bounty.

“I _am_ the best,” said Arthur, unable to contain his grin. 

There were cookies, perfect cookies, and there would be more of them. 

There was Eames, and there would be Eames, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow (and probably the tomorrow after that, too). 

A pretty good plan, if Arthur said so himself. 

Maybe the best.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [blackout] 
> 
> Earlier this week, I realized I'd written an entire theatre AU—complete with musical theatre references—without a single allusion to Grease. As such, of course, my crack musical headcanon is a "Summer Nights" rendition set Sunday evening, with Arthur/Mal/Ian and Eames/Ariadne/the RA. 
> 
> Not-after party at my [tumblr](http://consultingreaders.tumblr.com/); confirmed attendees include Eames, Arthur, Sherlock, John, Enjolras, and Grantaire.


End file.
